A Sombre Thought for 2015

                                                                 A  Sombre Thought for 2015

2014 was the year of Narendra Modi that started chiming from Sept 16 of the previous year when on his birthday he was anointed the PM- designate by BJP under the diktat of RSS. The last seven months has seen a change of Government at the Centre with Congress relegated to a distant second. The tally of 44 against the BJP’s at 282 in cricket vocabulary meant a forced follow on as  the congress fell  short by more than 200 seats. The subsequent contests played in different states including J&K have given it successive innings defeats. In the famous lines of ABBA,

                                                The winner takes it all
                                                The loser has to fall
                                                 It's simple and it's plain.

                                                Why should I complain?

Who complains? - No one as this is people’s verdict. But there have been hardly any earthshaking changes in the last seven months to distinguish the winner NDA from the loser UPA.  Apart from two major changes, the new government has not made any path breaking policies that conflict with those of the previous government. The first of the changes is that it has gone on a name changing spree in keeping with its avowed congress-mukht Bharat so that a lot of old schemes have been re-christened and  prefixed with the name of a BJP-RSS stalwart. Even the Planning Commission that had a Namkaran ceremony( the Hindu baby naming ceremony), if carefully screened has nothing to show except the English name was replaced by its Hindi equivalent- Niti Aayog-where ‘Niti’ means policy. Earlier Planning Commission was reporting to the National Development Council which had the state chief ministers and Lieutenant Governors as its members. Now the state Chief Ministers and Lieutenant Governors will be members of the newly christened Niti Aayog.  The second change is the government’s stranglehold on the media. The News channels today hardly have any breaking news that was the media’s privileged claim to make relentless onslaught on the previous UPA government. The Media had sufficient number of moles in their pay role within the UPA government to provide them with leaking news. Day in and day out, the 24hour news channels claimed access to all information and there was hardly anything that the government did or did not do that was not flashed on the TV screens. The fledgling Aam-admi party was encouraged by the media which attended  all the hasty press conferences it held to read out corruption charges against one or the other of the UPA ministers. If we look back on the charge sheets held out by the BJP and the Aam-admi party prior to the elections, we find in the post –elections period, , none of these charge sheets have stood scrutiny  nor have they been pursued  to their logical end of filling the Tihar jail with the UPA ministers. These charges got them victory in the elections and thus served their immediate purpose.  Having used the Media to the full to attack the then government, the present Modi government has plugged all information leaks except what the PMO dishes out to the media. The Ministers who were earlier regular commentators on the TV have been asked to burrow in their ministerial holes unless ordered by the PMO for limited interaction with the Media to do the Modi Ashtotra Namavali or  Modi Sahasranama Namavali (108/1000 names and titles in praise of Modi).

The UPA II was undone by the Media. It is not a rocket science to find out why media did so. It suddenly discovered its power and enjoyed exercising it. It was greatly helped by the UPA II government which remained  ignorant of the power of the Media-  in particular  of the social media. Anna Hazare started the ball rolling three years in nadvance and the TV cameras caught his movement  live to make Anna enter every household. A series of blunders by the UPA government such as the arrest of Anna Hazare, the initial fawning upon Ramdev and the later clumsy attempt to arrest him and foolishly letting him go disguised as a woman after swooping on him gave Media enough ammunition to blast the government. The result was  Congress was so much discredited that no one wanted to listen to it and its spokespersons were ridiculed and riled on and off the TV screens. All the good done by the Congress were interred with the charges of corruption unmindful of whether these charges were genuine or concocted. Congress was like

                                            Old McDonald, E-I-E-I-O

                                            here a corruption, there a corruption

                                           everywhere a corruption

                                            E-I-E-I-O.

So starting with the impeccable and unimpeachable PM, Man Mohan Singh through his intelligent and capable  cabinet ministers like  Chidambaram, Salman Khurshid, A.K.Antony, Manish Tewari, Jayanti Natarjan, Pawan Bansal  to state level functionaries like (late)Vilasrao Deshmuk), Ashok Chavan, Shinde etc , corruption charges were hurled thick and fast though even after seven months  of a new government in power, the nation still waits for their conviction and the only action CBI has done in the last few months is to set free the BJP president Amit Shah from his culpability in Sohrabuddin fake encounter case.

What went wrong with the UPA II? A couple of rotten eggs spoilt their work. Kalmadi and Raja were the first ones to dig the grave for the UPA. The media threw enough dirt at the entire government knowing that some will stick. The social media joined the TV and the mainstream newspapers to spread muck and filth all round. The media painted the image of a corrupt government in black and the saffronites latched on to the media and denounced the government. The UPA  II, despite its well educated and intelligent ministers was caught unawares and allowed the saffron surge to drown it. It suffered from surplus of experienced, educated and knowledgeable ministers and because there were one too many intelligent ministers there were a lot of ego problems amongst them. They did not see eye to eye with each other and proposals from one ministry was turned down by another.  What the right hand did was undone by the left hand and vice versa. The policy paralysis started by the main opposition party to stall all Bills in the parliament was further compounded by the superabundance of brainy ministers, each one of whom followed in his/her own direction. The advantage  Modi cabinet enjoys today is there are very few experienced and erudite ministers to indulge in internecine quarrel. For them Modi’s is the last word. By pitching the PMO above all the Ministers, they are kept on a tight leash with the Big Brother watching everyone of their movements including their lip movements. Not a squeak out of the cabinet and all that one sees on the newspapers, on the Bill boards, on the lamp posts, on the TV screens is the face of the Prime Minister.

UPA governed for ten years. Prior to that for the major part of post independence period, Congress was the ruling party. Had nothing been achieved in all these years as orchestrated by the BJP and endorsed by the media? Was corruption a new phenomenon under the UPA II only and not in the opposition ruled states and under the non-Congress governments that were in power for almost 14 years before 2014? Was there no one in UPA who could be called ‘Clean’ ? Were they all soiled one way or the other? A simple statistics detail will show the truth. Despite the world economic crisis, India was able to weather it with a GDP growth around 5.30, touching the highest at 11.40 in 2010. Septuagenarians like me have seen struggling India in the early years and can now see the difference of a vastly developed nation with the poverty rate consistently declining from 37.2% in 2004-05 to 22% in 2011-12.  To say India has not moved is a gross falsehood. The opposition screamed and the media blared it and the public lumped it. The result was witnessed in 2014 when the Congress was routed. The fault was that of the UPA –in particular the Congress heavyweights  who did not understand that in this age of media and social media, words speak louder than action. The more you shout, the more you are believed. The more abrasive you are, the stronger you appear. The coarser you are, the more you are heard. The more you tweet, the more muck you can spread. 

It is not that the UPA government was sparklingly clean or that India did not need Swachch Bharat campaign in a loftier sense than what is being bandied about today.  But the UPA government lacked the intelligence to use social media to counter many blatant untruths.  All the achievements of its ten year rule were junked by the Media to show that the only gainers were the corrupt UPA members.  At least twice –if not more- Rajdeep Sardesai had criticized the UPA government for not learning the lesson after 2008 by not having foolproof security along the Mumbai coastal line. We were all dumbstruck at the laxity and nervously wondered when we will have a repeat of 2008. But Chidambaram who took over Home Ministry never spoke a word about what the government was doing and the proof is seen today when a Pakistani boat with weapons was tracked by the coastal guards and was blown up by the intruding forces. This security measure could not have come up in the last few months, yet the media denunciation of yesteryears was not replied by the earlier government. Similarly all the efforts of Chidambaram for about eighteen months as finance minister have borne fruit today.  The incomprehensible silence of the UPA II government was a crucial factor in not countering the lies that spanned across the nation. Yet another factor was the totally inept and bankrupt leadership of the Congress with the PM, a silent onlooker, and its President and vice-president pathetically not fluent either in Hindi or in English to reach the illiterate and semi literate masses as well as the educated  and half educated middle class. The rasping, crude and mocking vocabulary of Modi had no matching voice among the Congress. The silence of the Congress leaders was taken as an affirmation of their sins of corruption and inefficiency and showed the BJP as a white lily in contrast. The polite and gentle learned professor of economics was seen as a weak, fragile and ineffectual leader while the brash 56”chested leader was seen as a forceful and decisive leader that the nation was waiting for. He was created by the Media and he knew  how to use it and how to keep it at arm’s length.  Harish Khare in “How Modi Won It: Notes From the 2014 Election” writes :  ‘During the heat of the elections,-Ii is the fourth week of March,-and the election campaign is in full swing, I am somehow troubled that the media has abandoned any pretext of neutrality, objectivity and all other professional virtues in its coverage, especially in its reportage of BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, …If money could buy an election, then the Bharatiya Janata Party is home and dry. If Corporate India could help purchase a mandate, then Mr Narendra Modi has already been sworn in, in that nice little ceremony in the forecourt of Rashtrapati Bhavan. And if the media’s professional gullibility could create a ‘lehar’, then India stands joyfully restored to the decisive leadership of decisive deshbhakts. All that remains is for us all to bow our heads and say amen.” Today there are many in the media who are like Harish Khare restless about the Janus faced BJP which talks of Development  on the one hand and silently endorses communalism on the other. But the number is small and belongs to the small group of liberals whom Modi holds in utter contempt.

The Congress has failed to avert follow-on in all the elections since May 2014. The nation is facing a majoritarian rule that borders on fascism. It is destroying the idea of India that was built on diversity and now that diversity is slowly getting replaced  bya forceful homogeneity. It is difficult to say what the future will be like! We have ceased to look at our failed western neighbour with its monotheistic religious outlook. I am not a votary of the present Congress leadership to dream of its return to power and becoming  sufficiently strong to resist communalism and concealed fascism. But we need some kind of a brake to resist the double pedalling where development is on the tip of a communalist agenda. Democracy can survive only if the society accommodates all people with their different religious, linguistic and cultural beliefs. Democracy can survive only when there is an effective opposition. There is no point in criticizing the present government for the sake of criticism. Where there is a deviation from the secular, multi -cultural, multi-religious, pluralisitic society of India that has helped the nation to live peacefully and harmoniously for nearly seven decades, we have to raise our voices lest we should lose the gift of democracy that we have till  now enjoyed.