Buch, Adani and Modi: Missteps in Managing a Credibility Crisis

 

On Tata, China and Modi

 

Stand up Routine

By Girish Menon. This is copyright material

Introduction:

S: Daddy, why don’t we make short satirical films  on issues that need some clarity?

D: Why, what’s the purpose?

S: This will give us a chance to explore what we think,  what we see and what it means?

D: I don’t know, son. 

 1.

Son: Daddy, Om Birla says that the names of Adani and Ambani cannot be raised in the Lok Sabha.

Daddy: Yes, I heard it too. He says, it's because Adani and Ambani are not in a position to respond to the allegations.

S: But the BJP always raises Nehru and Gandhi? Can they respond to the claims?

D: They believe the soul of Nehru and the Gandhis pervades parliament and hence can be invoked?

S: Does that mean that Ambani and Adani are soulless, Daddy?

D: I don't know son.

2.

Modiji phones Nirmala Sitharaman, 'Nirmalaji, yeh madhyam varg kyon ro rahen hai?

Nirmala: Sir, in Mussalmano ko rone do, Kuch dere ke baad chup ho jayenge'.

Modi: 'Kya matlab? Inme to koi Mussalman nahi hai'

Nirmala: Sir, yeh log hamare Mussaalman hai. Mera matlab hum shasan mein kuch bhi kar sakte hain aur chunav ke time par agar ham bole ki Hindu khatren mein hai to yeh kamal par angootha laga hi denge.

Modi: Ha, ha, main bhool gaya tha! Lage raho Nirmalaji.

3.

S: Daddy, a 40 year old American woman was found chained to a tree in the Sindhudurg forests for 40 days.

D: Yes, I heard that Lalita Kayi had come to India to learn yoga and meditation.

S: Doesn’t this chaining  require her to intensely meditate about her condition for 40 days, Daddy?

D: I don’t know son!

4.

S: Daddy, you remember the fairy tale 'The Emperor's New Clothes'? hat eventually happened to the truthful child?

D: Why do you ask? I think the child was subjected to severe punishment. Immediately after the parade he was pulled up by the Enforcement Directorate for being anti-national.

S: Did the people honour the child after the emperor was deposed?

D: Honoured? After the emperor was deposed the public pilloried him for destroying their dream.

S: Does that explain your experience with your bhakt friends and relatives?

D: I don’t know son!

5.

S: Daddy, are Indian industrialists as a class really patriotic?

D: Can we paint them all with one brush stroke? In any case, why do you ask?

S: The recent economic survey shows that while corporate profits have  risen significantly they have not invested or created new jobs in the economy? I thought we were doing trickle down economics?

D: So, while what you say is true, what's the question?

S: They also welcome free trade in all sectors but their own. Keep their money abroad and use robots and AI to meet their labour needs. So are they really patriotic, daddy?

D: I don’t know, son.

6.

S: Daddy, can we call Modi 3.0 a UPA 3 government?

D: Why, please explain.

S: Yesterday, both Modi and Seetharaman were comparing their performance with the UPA 1 & 2's performance 2004-2014.

D: But, didn't we vote for Modi expecting a big difference?

S: I don't know daddy?

7.

S: Daddy, most of the friends I meet these days hush hushedly refer to the threat posed by the increasing Muslim population. Is there such a threat to India?

D: I am not sure. I too have noticed more folks wearing the Islamist dress. One good way to know is to conduct a census. India's last census was in 2011.

S: Then, why does this eleven year old government shy away from any census, daddy?

D: I don't know, son

8.

S: Daddy, Rahul Gandhi has emerged as the voice of India’s downtrodden; the Dalits, Adivasis etc.

D: Yes, he appears popular with these groups. So what's your question?

S: Why don’t India’s downtrodden produce a leader from amongst their people?

D: I don’t know, son

9. 

S: Daddy, Rahul Gandhi tweeted the ED wants to question him.

D: Yes, I read that. I think he tweeted that from Wayanad.

S: Do you think the ED wants to know why he’s only visiting Manipur and Wayanad when our Agniveers are struggling in Russia and Ukraine?

D: I don’t know, son.

10.

S: Daddy, is Rahul Gandhi a loser?

D: He went to Manipur, set up a mohabbat ka dukaan and was seen consoling the victims of Wayanad?

S: But, he did not meet the cricket team nor congratulate Ms. Bhaker? Does that make Modiji a winner?

D: I don’t know, son.

11.

S: Daddy, The NGO 'Vote for Democracy' says that in 538 constituencies there is a discrepancy between the number of votes polled and the number of votes counted.

D: Yes, I read this. The discrepancy is to the tune of 50 million votes.

S: Could it then mean that the India alliance won the vote but the NDA won the count?

D: I don't know, son.

The First 50 days of Modi 3.0

 

India's Middle Class comes armed with Entitlement and little Gratitude

From Girish Menon

Modiji phones Nirmala Sitharaman, 'Nirmalaji, yeh madhyam varg kyon ro rahen hai?

Nirmala: Sir, in Mussalmano ko rone do, Kuch dere ke baad chup ho jayenge'.

Modi: 'Kya matlab? Inme koi Mussalman nahi hai'

Nirmala: Sir, yeh log hamare Mussaalman hai. Mera matlab hum kuch bhi kare aur chunav time par bole ki Hindu khatren mein hai to yeh kamal par angootha lag denge.

Modi: Ha, ha, main bhool gaya tha! Lage raho Nirmalaji.

---

Shekhar Gupta in The Print

With her latest Budget, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has walked into the nastiest of all hornets’ nests: the Great Indian Middle Class.

Through the week, she and her ministry have been pilloried on social media. Those in the mainstream media are dismayed, but more measured.

There can be reasonable, pragmatic, ideological, and even moral arguments against the new, Thomas Piketty-esque (soak the rich, especially when they earn from their accumulated wealth) changes in the capital gains taxes. It doesn’t justify the kind of outrage it has unleashed, with hundreds of furious, often personalised, memes.

Did the Modi government fail to read the minds of its most valuable constituency, the (mostly Hindu) middle class? Or did it take it too much for granted? In an earlier National Interest published on 6 July, 2019, we had argued that the middle classes were like the Modi BJP’s Muslims.

That somewhat cheeky formulation was drawn from how the government continued to collect more and more by way of taxes on petrol and diesel to fund its humongous programme of direct benefit transfers to the poor. It was a kind of innovative Robin Hood politics. Take from the middle class and give to the poor.

It made the poor, who constitute a vast majority of voters, happy. And if the middle class was fretting, so be it. They were going to vote for the BJP anyway. Our argument was that the BJP could take the middle-class votes for granted like the ‘secular’ parties with the Muslims.

Will this change now? I guess not. This fury will blow over, probably as some ‘corrections’, especially on indexing, are made, and buttons more significant than taxes are pushed: nationalism, religion, the Gandhi family. The usual mix. Many of those ranting now will continue to vote for the BJP. They are not disaffected with Modi, his party, or its ideology. They adore all three. At this point, they are simply like slighted lovers.

What the Modi government got wrong with this Budget and in its economic signalling is in moving away from its generally upbeat, ‘India is on the rise, growth will get steeper, markets are red hot and will get redder’ messaging. A sobering signal from the Budget, if sensible and prudent, is a bummer for the faithful.

The middle class, however, is addicted to good news, hype, even gratitude, and believe each Budget should make them more money.

What they did not want to be told instead was: ‘Listen, guys, you’ve made a lot, especially in the decade’s boom. It’s time you paid back a bit more.’ And maybe that it wasn’t quite virtuous to make even more money on your accumulated wealth.

The rich won’t bother. The middle class, especially those in the lower half of this large socio-economic section who took large EMIs, bought second homes as investments, moved their savings from RBI-guaranteed bank fixed deposits to stocks, mutual funds and debt bonds, are the ones kicking at the government’s shins.

Many of them might’ve lived with increased taxation. They love Narendra Modi and his larger politics enough to be willing to pay some price for it. After all, more than a crore of them gave up their LPG subsidy on his ‘give it up’ call. What’s taken them by surprise is the change in messaging. They probably see this as being told that they’ve done something immoral, made too much money, and the state is reining them back in.

Since reform began in the summer of 1991, successive governments and finance ministers have had one consistent focus: driving those with any financial surpluses towards the markets. That is why capital gains tax breaks were brought in and expanded over these decades. The markets said ‘thank you’, boomed, and rewarded the governments of the day.

Every government in these 33 years, especially the current one, has celebrated the rising number of mutual fund folios, demat accounts and rising indices. Some of the recent nudges, beginning with action on the debt bonds in the 2023 Budget, seem to be directed at bringing the same surplus-generating classes back to bank deposits. They were not ready for it.

Just what is India’s middle class? A lifestyle approach is too amorphous, anecdotal. Do the income tax payers make this middle class? The number of those who actually pay taxes, less than a third of those who file returns (2.2 crore out of 7.4) will not even be a fraction of what has long been on the way to becoming the world’s largest middle class.

It might be safer, instead, to think about what this middle class wants. It wants, and definitely expects, India to be the hottest economy in the world, a leader in fields ranging from economics to science, sports to the military, manufacturing to software, and of course all this with a historically mandated right to sermonise to the world.

They may not use the expression, but they do not dispute the claim or at least the ambition of being vishwaguru. They love to believe the West is in decline and India’s time has come. If I were to record one video saying the dollar is on its last legs, that American power is in terminal decline, that Europe is finished, it would be bound to go viral. Never mind the facts. The scene that most characterises this middle-class mood is enacted every sunset at the Wagah border flag lowering.

Those are the expectations with which they keep voting for Modi/BJP. They see their own growing wealth, the market boom, the world coming to invest in India, as elements in the same package. Ideally, of course, they’d want to achieve all this while paying no taxes. Or Singapore-level taxes. They’d be OK with Singapore-level democracy as well. Now they’re being told to return to bank fixed deposits!

Since it is tempting to get ahead of myself, I will stop here. Let’s just say we still do not know what the middle class is and what it wants. Let’s stick to what we know the Indian middle class isn’t. That is, being grateful.

The heat the Modi government is feeling will cool down soon. But name the one person who’s done more than any other Indian across three generations to create, expand and enrich this new middle class. By deregulating, burning the licence-quota raj, opening imports, cutting taxes and tariffs, and pushing the same middle class towards the markets with generous tax incentives.

Then let us ask who’s the one leader the same middle class has detested most of all since, say, 2011. You’ve guessed right. He is Dr Manmohan Singh. In 1999, he and his party checked out his popularity in India’s most middle-class constituency by fielding him for the Lok Sabha in South Delhi. He lost. What did they expect? A thank-you vote? He’s only got contempt instead. This middle class comes armed with entitlement, not burdened with gratitude.

Interpreting India's 2024 Elections: 'India's elites have let it down badly'

 

Anand Rangnathan on Rise or Decline of Modi, Nupur Sharma & Fact Checking Business

 

'Is Modi a King of Good Times Only?'

 

Rahul Gandhi in da House: Parts of speech expunged + Modi's reply

 

Parts of Rahul Gandhi's above speech expunged by Speaker Om Birla

Is there a split between the RSS and the BJP?

 

Why Prabhakar Parakala doubts if Modi can pass the floor test

 

Prashant Kishor on Why his Election Predictions were Inaccurate

 

Will Modi learn how to work in a coalition government?

 

'BJP will not get a Majority': Subramanian Swamy

 

BJP will do better than 2019

 

How many Modi's exist in this Multiverse

 

'BJP will get 200-220 seats in 2024': Parakala Prabhakar

 

Is asking Muslims to introspect too much?

Ibn Khaldun Bharati in The Print

The Modi Raj has been an undisguised blessing for Indian Muslims. They never experienced the kind of peace and prosperity that they have been enjoying for the past 10 years. Never in the history of independent India a decade has been so free from long, protracted bouts of Hindu-Muslim riots as the one from 2014-24; and never since the 1990s have Muslims remained so untouched by the shadow of suspicion on account of frequent bomb blasts and terrorist attacks. More importantly, never have Muslims evinced such little sign of unrest over non-issues as in these 10 years.

There has been a positive behavioural change in the community. Their focus has shifted from emotional agitation to constructive pursuits, which has begun to reflect in the unprecedented success of their youth in competitive examinations. A sign of their all-round progress is this year’s Civil Services Examination results, which have as many as 51 Muslims in the list of successful candidates. Such a number was unheard of during the Secular Raj.

Though Modi Raj has inspired a behavioural change in the Muslim community, for it to become permanent, it has to be accompanied by a sincere ideological transformation.

Narendra Modi, who always spoke of Muslims as inseparable from the 140 crore Indians, recently, in an interview with Times Now, spoke especially to them, and urged them to do something which no one wants them to — introspect!

He urged them to look into the sense of deprivation that they have been nurturing. The day such introspection is undertaken, the ground will slip from under the feet of the liberal politics of appeasement and the Muslim politics of victimhood.

Aversion to introspection

Introspection is a word that infuriates Muslim ideologues and makes Left-liberals no less indignant. In their opinion, Muslims, as self-proclaimed victims, can only have a litany of grievances against the Hindu community and the Indian state and make the claim — the First Claim — on its resources as compensation. Introspection is another name for self-investigation. A guilty conscience can’t face it. Not surprising why it makes the Muslim opinion makers so uneasy. The entitlements internalised over centuries of Muslim rule have made the Muslim elite incapable of self-enquiry. They are a people of rights, not duties. Therefore, they want the Hindu community and the Indian state to introspect why the Muslims are not happy with them.

One may ask why the idea of introspection so unsettles Muslim ideologues — the ulema, politicians, academics, columnists, journalists and social media influencers. Is it because the inconvenient questions may lay much of blame at their own doorstep? For example, how Islam came to India and what the nature of the Muslim rule was may be an academic question, but to ask whether medieval supremacism has been renounced or continues to flow in the contemporary Islamic discourse is a politically pertinent question. Do they have the character to answer it honestly? The inability to satisfactorily answer it forces them to allege “victim-blaming” — they being the universal victims. There is a deeper reason too. Muslim politics is so intricately imbricated into Islam that questioning it may implicate the religion and bring discredit whose consequences may unravel their worldview. It’s an existential question.

Enemy’s enemy is a friend

Muslims’ aversion to introspection has been as much their fault as of the post-Independence ‘secular’ politics. Independence came with Partition — the triumph of Muslim communalism over secular nationalism. Even as secularism lay defeated, Jawaharlal Nehru sensed a threat to his rule from the large Hindu nationalist faction of the Congress, and the forces represented by Hindu Mahasabha and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). He needed allies to fight them, and who could be a better ally against Hindu nationalism than the people of the Muslim League, who, having carved out a separate country for themselves, decided to stay back in India as they saw their interests better served here? Nehru needed them and pleaded with them to not leave. They were inducted into the Congress and made legislators and ministers without any re-education into the secular ethos on which he professed to base the new state. What an irony that they were taken into Congress not for their new-found secularism but for their old commitment to Muslim communalism. The perverse import that the Nehruvian template — the communalism of the majority is far more dangerous than the communalism of the minority — imparted to the secular praxis, has been so enduring that 77 years hence, no secular party wants Muslims to secularise. Indian secularism has thrived on Muslim communalism.

If the Muslim society is haunted by dejection for not having the standing that is its due, it’s the responsibility of their thought-leaders to diagnose the malaise and prescribe the recovery. Though the public intellectuals of any society come from its elite section, they inevitably end up critiquing the privileges of their own class, which hinders the progress of the masses. This small band of conscientious individuals keeps the moral compass of the society headed true north.

The Hindu society has been brought back to life by the people whose critique abolished their own privileges. In the social reform movements of the 19th century, it were the ‘upper’ caste men who first agitated against caste and gender discrimination. Later, the Constitution was enacted by the members of the Constituent Assembly, who had come from privileged backgrounds and were elected by a very limited electorate of the elite. However, by enshrining the promise of equality and instituting adult suffrage, they effectively abolished their own class. And, in the aftermath of independence, it were largely the legislators from the landed gentry who passed the zamindari abolition and land ceiling laws. The regeneration of Hindu society owes a lot to the self-annihilation of its elite. The ideal of tyag (sacrifice) had some reflection in collective renunciation too.

Character of Muslim elite

The Indian Muslim elite, aka the Ashraaf, remained tenaciously wedded to their tribal interests, and with animalistic instinct of self-preservation, tried to defend their privileges. They couldn’t reconcile to the loss of centuries-old political power, and as the Hindu society developed and raced past them in education, culture and politics, they formulated the ideology of victimhood. The promise of equal citizenship appeared to them as a diminution of their historical stature, and therefore, ‘weightage’ and ‘special treatment’ became the stock phrases in their political lexicon. They wanted an equivalent of Article 370, or special provision, in every sphere.

And, because they controlled the religious discourse and the political narrative, their sense of loss became universalised as the deprivation of the Muslim masses. In reality, however, the Muslim masses had been steadily prospering alongside other Indians, as the economy grew and democracy deepened. The Muslim melancholia is a poetic trope and narrative tool. It is a false consciousness.

Playing kingmaker

The arrogance of “satta pe hum bithayenge, hum utarenge (We decide who shall rule and who shall not)” is another delusion that Modi has appealed to Muslims to disabuse themselves of. The Hindu society has been in continuous churn for the last 200 years. India’s growth is a direct outcome of the progress toward social justice achieved through caste and gender reforms. Muslim ideologues mistook this churning as implosion, and the reform as derangement. They not only looked with glee at what they misperceived as the disintegration of the Hindu society, but actively interfered with the process by siding with one caste group against another. The only thing worse than divide-and-rule is divide-but-not-rule. While the Muslims strutted around as kingmakers, they were just wageless mercenaries. Being viewed as the ones who, after dividing the country, were now dividing the Hindu society, the Muslims invited the wrath that they could have done without.

And what did they receive from their favoured parties in return for the en bloc voting? Little besides a license to indulge in socially aggressive behaviour that would give them an illusion of political domination. Very often, there would be an open display of brazenly communal, anti-social and even anti-national activities. Riots were the inevitable consequence of this kind of politics. The irony is that when a riot erupted, the vote-bank parties left Muslims to their fate. During the Secular Raj, Hindu-Muslim riots were as regular as seasonal crops.

Not against Muslims

Though he need not, but Modi specified that he is not anti-Muslim or anti-Islam. He is just pro-India, which, besides being 80 per cent Hindu, is 14 per cent Muslim too. If Muslim ideologues see him as anti-Muslim, they would better introspect about the inherent conflict between their idea of the Muslim identity and India. Have they ever wondered why there isn’t a complete overlap between Muslim and Indian as there is between Hindu and Indian? Why the phrase ‘Indian Muslim’ doesn’t sound as ludicrous as Indian Hindu? Why do they have to resort to arcane theories of multiple identities and avoid answering their own question about the hierarchy of identities, whether one is first an Indian or a Muslim? They have to resolve the self-created dichotomy of belief and belonging. The Modi era is the best time for this, for he is not into a transactional relationship with them. He serves them equally irrespective of whether they vote for him or not.

'What's Happening is Plunder': Subramanian Swamy

 

'There's an arrogance about democracies, we think we are better'