The Empire Of Cruelty

On May 9, Mahavir Narwal, father of Natasha Narwal, a student activist who led the Pinjra Tod ­movement, died of Covid. He could not meet, or talk to, his daughter before he died. She had been in Tihar Jail for over a year, charged under UAPA. If you had to pick any moment that exemplified the character of the Narendra Modi regime, this small story is perhaps as emblematic as any. It is a reminder, in miniature, that the Modi ­government, as it completes its seventh year in power, is presiding over unfathomable scenes of death and suffering. The pandemic’s second wave would ­probably have hit India hard under any ­circumstance. But there is no question that the Modi government’s ­indifference, incompetence and ­callousness has given the empire of death a greater rein than it otherwise might have had. But the story is also emblematic in other ways. A young student activist is in jail charged under anti-terror laws. It is a reminder that the government has converted ­political protest or small transgressions of the law into acts of treason; it uses law as an instrument of repression. It ­showcases the ways in which independent institutions in India—like the courts—have, with a few exceptions, failed to uphold basic civil liberties or substantive due process. Natasha was accused of being part of a premeditated conspiracy leading up to the Delhi riots. The fact that she, like many political prisoners, was charged under UAPA, while those from the ruling party who openly incited violence are roaming free, is a measure of just how openly communal and partisan the State has become. And then there is the individual poignancy of the story that will be lost amid all the political recrimination: a father struggling to get relief for an idealistic daughter who was imp­risoned by the State, a comrade-in-arms really, and dying without being able to see her.

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When funeral pyres are lit up in thousands, it is impossible to adequately acknowledge the singularity of any individual ­tragedy. India is facing a pandemic on a scale that constitutes one of the most serious crises the nation has faced since ­independence. Daily deaths are already at the 4,000-mark, and this is an undercount by at least a factor of three or four. The second wave of Covid in India was always going to be a ­challenge. The disease is infectious and India has long underinvested in public health. But what even Modi supporters are beginning to ack­nowledge is that the government’s handling of the pandemic has been an exercise in spectacular abdication. In many ways, it has also revealed the true character of the ­regime and the legacy it leaves us in its seventh year in office.

Ordinary mortals might be tempted to measure Narendra Modi’s seven years in power by conventional standards of ­assessment. How much growth did India achieve? How much welfare was institutionalised? How secure is India against its competitors? Has corruption reduced? How have institutions performed? Are we, as a society, stronger, more resilient and inclusive than a decade ago? These are ­reasonable questions and typically ones that would be part of a ­seven-year report card. But Modi was not elected to be measured by answers to reasonable questions; in fact, he does not answer any real questions at all. So it would be grossly unfair to impose these questions on him. He was ­re-e­­­lected in 2019 for an ideological objective: the ­institutionalisation of India as a Hindu State. And he was ­celebrated for a governance style whose hallmark is an ­unremitting pol­itical cruelty. Those are the achievements on display in full measure in the seventh year. Any other policy measures or achievements are incidental to these projects.

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But you might still wonder why, in the face of a pandemic, the Modi government is cutting such a sorry figure. What explains that fact? It might be tempting to dismiss this simply as the eff­ects of power. Often long-incumbent regimes simply lose their touch. The UPA, which on most accounts performed spectacularly well in its first term, was looking distinctly a weakened political entity by the second year of its second term. In its first term, it got India onto a path of eight per cent growth, put in place a new social contract on welfare, introduced far-reaching institutional reform like the Right to Information Act, invested in infrastructure, and deepened both democracy and economic growth. In the second term, perhaps because its own success had raised expectations, the UPA was harshly criticised for ­corruption, policy paralysis, institutional disarray and almost a lack of will to govern or take control, although in retrospect these vices seems small in comparison to the whole-scale ­abdication being inflicted on us now.

For, there is no analogy between the UPA’s loss of will in its seventh year, and this government’s spectacular failure. This is not just because the scale of failure is now massively more ­ominous. It is also because while in the UPA there was a loss of will, each one of this government’s spectacular failures is an int­ended consequence of its governing philosophy. The cruelty, callousness and seeming incompetence is meant to be the ­feature, not the bug.

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Modi’s political success was his ability to produce an identification with himself. Partly this was a story rooted in biography, where his personal rise was its­elf seen as a rebuke to an old plutocratic, dynastic order. Partly this was produced by growing Hindu communalism: his ability to project himself as the personification of Hindus. In his telling, he is their political saviour, their high priest, who symbolically liberated them from a thousand-year subjugation and seeming pusillanimity, and gave them the strength to assert ruthless political power. This is the avatar he took on in what he might perhaps consider the high point of his seven years: the bhoomi pujan of the mandir at Ayodhya. Part of it was produced by an unmediated ­communication style, a claim of being able to intuit what the people want. Perhaps communication is a misnomer here, since this style involves no listening. It is rather a claim to an intuitive identification. As he used to put it in the lead-up to the 2014 election, “Jo thhaare dil mein chhe, vo mhaare dil mein chhe” (What is in your heart is in my heart).

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But what he intuited was the darkness in our hearts: that if he could nurse cruelty into an art form, it would be regarded as a show of strength. He was not going to be elected because of his compassion, because of an empathetic identification with ­suffering, or the concerns of ordinary mortals. The country was hungry for the untrammelled exercise of power. For the rich, India’s capitalists, who provide the gigantic machinery of fin­ance and media to underwrite his control over power, his power would curb and discipline populist demands, the soft-hearted bows to welfare schemes that previous governments had indulged in. For many less privileged, he seemed to ­promise a smashing of the old power structure, a dismantling of an increasingly distant and culturally alien elite. This ­required the ruthless exercise of power. The country had also convinced its­elf at the end of UPA-2 that it was suffering from a surfeit of softness: we were too soft on our troublesome neighbours, too soft on minorities, too soft in the face of criticism, too soft in times that called for hard decisions. Only the soft create nat­ional identities through democratic negotiation, or defer to checks and balances or feel constrained by the facts.

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It is this basic truth that was going to set the template for this government. For the success of the government was no longer going to be measured by what it achieved: it was going to be measured simply by its ability to engage in spectacular displays of power. The more callous and imperious you ­app­eared, the more it was a sign of success. Demonetisation was, in some ways, the most emblematic expression of this power. It was hailed as a success not because it achieved any of its obj­ectives or reduced black money or the amount of cash in the economy, but because it was a spectacular exercise of power; the point was to demonstrate the willingness to imp­ose hardship. The more hardship was imposed, the more successful the regime seemed; after all, that is the sign we were looking for in measuring success.

So it is a bit pointless to chalk up a conventional scorecard. Any such scorecard would look at economic performance first. And it has been somewhere between bad to middling. The government had inherited a struggling economy, largely because of a broken banking sector, and a slowdown in the global economy. But in seven years, the government has come nowhere close to demonstrating that India is on a secure path to the high growth rates averaging eight per cent achieved from 2002 to 2010. The economy has been subject to shocks. First was the self-imposed shock of demonetisation. Then came the pandemic. But it has to be remembered that growth was slowing down for eight consecutive quarters before the pandemic. The Modi government is sometimes given high marks for not being macro-economically reckless. But some of that was facilitated by relati­vely low oil prices, which kept the balance of payments under control and also allowed the government to mop up high excise ­revenues without risking inflation.

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On the reform side, GST was the big event, but its implementation was ­needlessly botched and made complicated. Other legal reforms, like the IBC, were also patchy in implementation. India’s approach to integration in the global economy has been confusing. Make in India was replaced by Aatmanirbhar Bharat as a slogan. Certainly, the desire to move manufacturing to India and ­diversify the Indian economy’s capabilities is laudable; the ­production-linked incentive schemes may yield modest ­dividends. But the heady days of optimism about India being capable of spectacular growth are gone. The Modi regime promised to take on India’s plutocracy. But India has ended up with even greater concentration of capital and greater ­cronyism in favour of big capital than before.

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On the welfare side, the government very quickly found that the flagship programme of the UPA that it had derided as an example of soft economic thinking, MGNREGA, was the only lifeline that most poor Indians had; and this is the programme that literally staved off a humanitarian catastrophe post ­pandemic. To the government’s credit, it went about the cause of Swachch Bharat with some gusto and tried to convert it into a social movement. The gains were impressive. But by claiming nearly 95 per cent success in creating an open defecation-free India, the government cast doubt on its own success. It also moved to a delivery model of what Arvind Subramanian calls “public private goods”—gas, electricity, housing. In this, the government followed the states, of distributing goods that could be directly attributed to the prime minister. Some of these schemes had modest success. Under the Ujjwala scheme, eight crore gas connections were distributed by 2020. Some of these might have paid electoral dividends. But if you look at the actual uptake and growth in the use of gas, the scheme looks less impressive. The government also went in for an expansion of private health insurance. Public health and public education were severely neglected.

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But to measure this regime in these prosaic policy terms is to spectacularly miss the systemic destruction it has unleashed. The more it destroyed, the more it confirmed the fact that it was powerful. Its power was nowhere more manifest than in its attempt to control two of the most important aspects of our lives: truth and identity. Take the first—power over truth itself. Most observers decry the fact that the regime, in a way unique in the annals of democratic India, was committed to ­controlling the information order, which it did in cooperation with Indian capital, global social media companies, opaque election fin­ancing and outright use of the power of the State. The more propaganda, lies and tall claims it unleashed, the more powerful it appeared. It is not that no one could see through the lies or exaggerations of the reg­ime. Even BJP supporters are often self-aware enough to see through holes in their factual logic. It was rather that it was the act of lying itself that was the act of power. Fidelity to truth presupposes that power recognises something higher than itself. But when the point is to assert power, the more you make up stuff, the more powerful you appear to be.   

The second strategy was the power over identity. The BJP had a strong Hindutva agenda. Its objective was to assert Hindu majoritarian power and enshrine it in law and policy. This was manifest, for example, in the discriminatory Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the increasing legal regulation of interfaith marriage, the protection of cow vigilantism and so on. The second is to reconfigure Hinduism itself into an ethnic identity, a movement for blood and soil that supplants Hinduism’s rich and complex spiritual and intellectual ­heritage and converts it to a tool for asserting raw power. Anyone who does not march to the drumbeat of this identity is an anti­-national; not someone who merely disagrees, but someone who constitutes a threat. This is an identity secured largely by conjuring up a series of imagined threats: minorities, intellectuals, leftists, or the few remaining Hindus who dare challenge the moral carpet-bombing of their religion.

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We did not want outcomes, we wanted an enactment of power. So we thought nothing of the monopoly claimed over truth or identity. And so cruelty came to be institutionalised. First came the lynchings. They may not have been statistically significant in numbers. But they were spectacular displays of cruelty. The fact that lynchings could be carried out with ­impunity, and its perpetrators idealised, sent a chilling ­message. Then came Kashmir. Admittedly, between the Indian State, local militants and Pakistan, Kashmir’s recent history has been constantly written in blood and betrayal. One can even debate the merits of abolishing Article 370. But the degradation of the state into a Union territory with no other purpose than to hum­iliate it, the suspension of habeas corpus for which no Indian court provided any effective redress, one of the longest internet shutdowns…all these were designed to show ­resolve and power. Whether these instruments were necessary is an open question. But they were dry runs for perfecting the arsenal of cruelty, which was then applied to protest after ­protest. In some states like UP, we went a step further. We ­created a political culture where vigilantism and intimidation on behalf of the ruling dispensation was to be rewarded, not punished. The list goes on. A limited lockdown when the pandemic first started may have been justified. But the manner in which it was imposed, and the hardships inflicted on migrant labour, was also a wanton act of cruelty. If the government now app­ears indifferent and imp­erious, we should not be surprised: it is being true to its character. And so on and on it goes.

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Till the 2019 election, the PM was often accused of “fakery”, ­appearing to be all things to all ­people. There was something to that charge, but in a curious kind of way “fakery” was at least a tacit acknowledgment that he needed to take into account how he looked in the eyes of others; he needed to fool them. There is a hint of democracy to the politics of appearances. But what has gradually rep­laced it, especially over the past two years, is the projection of an imperious, omnipotent persona pure and ­simple, one that now simply commands and does not even need to pretend. It is not an accident that, during the ­pandemic, the one thing the prime minister has not done is at least pretend to be a personification of our collective grief and mourning. He has taken his power to new heights. He has moved from wanting the power to try and fool you to the power of not even having to bother to fool you.

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What about execution capabilities? After all, this was a prime minister who promised to build a more capable state. But in so many ways, the Indian State looks even less capable now than it did seven years ago. For a government that makes a fetish of national defence, defence spending as a percentage of GDP is actually down, and this is not because of more efficient spending. So much for execution capabilities in an area that matters to them. Or take a more recent example. How did this government manage to botch up vaccine procurement, a spectacular own goal for which India is paying a steep price? The total price tag for vaccinating the country would be no more than Rs 60,000 crore, eminently affordable. Vaccine procurement is not rocket science. Did it simply not care? Did it come to bel­ieve its own lies about Indian exceptionalism? Does it not have the bureaucratic and technical capabilities? Or did it choose not to bat an eyelid while subjecting the country to vaccine Darwinism, a free-for-all competition unleashed under conditions of scarcity. But in the botching up of execution capabilities hangs a tale. The Indian State was always uneven in its capabilities, and the one thing this crisis has shown is how hard government employees work when required. But this regime’s sapping of state capacity is far more insidious than it first app­ears. When the raison d’etre of the State is projecting the power of the leader, the energies of the State are directed tow­ards image management. Even the best and the brightest who serve in the State dare not show independence or competence. How else does one explain the fact that someone as spectacularly bright and rigorous in his thinking as S. Jaishankar, intellectual heir to the great K. Subrahmanyam, now acts as a pale version of Ribbentrop doing a petulant cover-up job. There is a moral in this story, and the moral is this: the mystique of power has to be sustained at all costs, and what better way to sustain it than to reduce the best and brightest to cogs in the cruelty machine: any bureaucrat or scientist or anyone with ­independent knowledge is, with their own connivance, condemned to shoring up the mystique of power. They have to amplify the staged absurdities of power, not act as a check and balance. By making everything serve the leader, the State becomes ­incapable of serving anything else.

We should not be surprised that this ­government’s handling of the pandemic has added one more chapter in that long saga of cruelty and incompetence. We did not mind the incompetence because it was the assertion of power that counted and not the res­ult. The country’s marginalised have always been left to their own devices; the privileged always had their fortifications and means of escape. For the past seven years, we rationalised away everything: the erosion of checks and balances, the diminution of civil liberties, the communal coarsening of civil society, the uneven economic performance, the deteriorating security situa­tion on the border. Ah, but what power, we said! This was the radiant thought that enabled them to survive every failure.

Every protest, whether the one against CAA or by farmers, ended in a whimper, since at the end of day, they did not ­generate enough cross-cutting solidarity. Clamping down on the protests simply added to the power. But when death and suffering in large numbers come knocking on our door, we might finally be woken from our slumber. We might finally recognise what this regime did to us as a nation. This regime’s greatest achievement in seven years is that it made us a ­nat­ion of resentful hearts, small minds and constricted souls.  We might think this is a failure. But this is how the Modi ­government set out to define its success, and it succeeded all too well. 

(The auhtor is a political commentator. Views expressed are personal)