An ill wind has blown across the Indian political-economic horizon. It is that the Congress party, having suffered an existential and humiliating defeat in the 2014 national selection, has decided to hit back with a vengeance typical of the almost vanquished. For two years, the Congress party has been on an obstructionist path, and it will not be unfair to state that a considerable portion of the Western elite English media is extraordinarily sympathetic to the Congress.
There are historical reasons for this sympathy—the “liberal” media and the pseudo-liberal Congress have been allies since Independence—and the alliance has been cemented via a common ‘left of centre’ economic ideology. This can be easily deduced from the economic icons of the Congress and their intellectual comrades—Jawahar Lal Nehru and Amartya Sen.
One of the reasons why the Congress party lost so big in 2014 was because India has changed from being a poor economy to a non-poor, emerging middle-class and middle-class society. That India was non-poor at the time of the 2014 election is easily established by noting that according to NSS data for FY12, and the Tendulkar absolute poverty line (near identical to the PPP 1.9 dollar per person per day World Bank poverty line), the poor in India accounted for only 12 % of the population. Add to this the fact that the NSS estimate of average consumption in India (relative to average per capita consumption as revealed by the national accounts, old GDP data!) was less than 50 %. If, for the poor, under-reporting is even half that of the non-poor, then absolute poverty in India, in FY12, was less than 100 million, or less than 8 % of the population. A tragically high number, but a considerably less potent political force. The numbers, and the force, has been taken over by the emerging middle-class (EMC) and the middle-class.
It is this transformation from a poor to a middle-income, non-poor society which is the biggest transformation India has seen in its history, and something that is crucial to understand for intellectuals, policy makers, and politicians. So, while Sonia-Gandhi-led Congress was debating about poverty being equal to 800 million in 2013 (two-thirds of the population a la the Food Security Bill), the BJP, under Modi, was championing the cause of the middle-classes (jobs, growth, development), and winning.
As part of this transformation, it is inevitable that there will be elements within the EMC whose social and political ideology is not conducive to development, freedom, or true liberal values. Hence, the emphasis on illiberal views like ghar wapsi, love jihad, anti-Muslim propaganda and condemnation of illiberal students. But lest we pine for the old liberal order, just a few reminders. The old naam-ke-vaaste liberals did not support economic freedom in any form and pandered to religious ‘un-freedom’ by not supporting a common civil code. What makes the old liberal attitudes particularly nauseating is that they supported the suppression of freedom for women, particularly Muslim women.
Further, the old liberal Congress order was never for economic freedom, and in this, they were ably supported by the left, large elements of the UPA, and large elements of the regressive emerging middle-class housed in the BJP. Let us call the latter, without any exaggeration, as the BJP’s very own, home-grown Tea Party.
Thus, while the Congress has been obstructionist, the BJP Tea Party has been more than happy to accommodate Congress’s obstruction. Just note the unrelenting sequence of events in this battle between the new wannabe elite and the old established elite. This especially peaks around election time and then dies soon after. However, given that we have a series of state elections, the peaks and valleys are frequent. But since the same nonsense will not have the same appeal, the peaks are punctuated by different issues—ghar wapsi, student suicides and now student demonstrations. Each issue trumpeted by the media as scaling new heights of intolerance.
Part of the Congress’s policy has been—and on this one must credit them with devilish intelligence—to provoke the BJP , and the lumpen Tea Party elements will be honour-bound to react with negative absurdity. And the chain reaction will lead to the BJP being broadly perceived as intolerant, anti-secular, anti-Muslim, and anti-everything but upper caste Hindu!
A perusal of the newspapers, TV discussions, learned accounts from domestic and foreign “intellectuals” is strongly indicative that this Sonia-Gandhi-led Congress and liberal-left strategy has succeeded beyond all expectations. Except now it seems that the BJP has finally become wiser, or more accurately, less stupid.
Over the last six weeks or so, the top leadership of the BJP has enforced much-needed restraint on the lumpen Tea Party elements. When, via utter and extreme stupidity, the BJP top-brass came in with a sledgehammer to dislodge Kanhaiya Kumar, the old style Tea Party demanded, through its agent Kuldeep Varshney, a member of BJP’s youth wing: “I will award Rs 5 lakh to the person who will cut off Kanhaiya’s tongue,” Hours after he stated this, he was expelled for six years. In earlier times, this hatred would have been ignored by the BJP leadership, if not rewarded.
Further, two recent incidents reinforce the belief that the BJP may have finally learnt its lessons. First, in beefy Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis’s own assembly, a BJP MLA, Bhimrao Dhonde, questioned the anti-poor credentials of BJP’s beef ban by protesting, “Why should you snatch away the poor’s meal?” Possibly shocked by these liberal developments, the Congress severely upped the scale of its provocation. A very senior member of the party, the leader of the Congress in the Rajya Sabha, Ghulam Nabi Azad, taunted the BJP by likening its political associate (and some say its godfather), the RSS, to the dreaded ISIS. “So, we oppose organisations like ISIS, the way we oppose RSS. If those among us in Islam too do wrong things, they are no way less than RSS,” Azad thundered.
Just weigh the import of this statement by weighing in with the counter-factual—what would the Congress have done, either today or when they were in control, 2004-2014, if their leader, Indira Gandhi, had been likened to ISIS? Clearly, there would have been a furore, as there should be; but why no fury in the English media about this most irresponsible and “fascist” statement uttered by a Congress leader?
And now possibly the last straw, and the one that will proverbially break the back of Congress’s obstruction movement. In a pointed reference to Congress’s disruptive tactics, Modi said the following at the end of a BJP meeting on March 27: “We should not engage in irrelevant issues. We should work on our agenda. Our rivals will try that we remain engaged in irrelevant issues and the government’s work is not discussed among the people. We should move ahead with one mantra: vikas, vikas, vikas. This is the answer to our country’s all problems and we are working in this direction.”
If the BJP stresses on both social harmony and vikas, what can the political opposition do to regain relevance?
The author is contributing editor, The Financial Express, and senior India analyst, The Observatory Group, a New York-based macro-policy advisory group. Twitter: @surjitbhalla