Bitter pill

The Bharatiya Janata Party parliamentarian, Subramanian Swamy, feels that he could be the best finance minister the country has ever had. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi has, so far, chosen to keep this self-proclaimed talent at arm’s length. Angry over being ignored, Swamy has started targeting the Prime Minister’s Office. He recently said that the PMO should be “cleansed”. He even took a jab at the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Shaktikanta Das, calling for his removal. Swamy feels that the bureaucrats heading the PMO are useless and are not giving the right advice to the PM. The emphasis is on telling Modi that he should heed Swamy’s prescription to turn around the battered economy. In the first Modi government, Swamy’s principal enemy was the now-deceased Union minister, Arun Jaitley. Swamy felt that it was on account of Jaitley that he was being ignored by Modi. But he continued to be ignored even after the untimely passing of Jaitley, and this seems to have tested the 80-year-old politician’s patience like never before. Swamy has a big following on Twitter of around 9.1 million, and he is using this power to give out “#WordsofWisdom” in English and “#GyanGanga” in Hindi. Even though he is a party MP, the BJP, too, prefers to give Swamy a wide berth. The party leadership believes that Swamy is indeed talented but also potentially an ‘unguided missile’ and, as such, best kept at a distance.

Magic mantra

There was an undeclared race among saffron party members to hail Narendra Modi as his second government completed one year in office. The Madhya Pradesh chief minister, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, seemed to have emerged the clear winner. Chouhan took to imitating the former BJP leader and the current vice-president of India, M Venkaiah Naidu, in hailing Modi. Naidu is known for his use of alliteration and acronyms; Chouhan used that skill on Saturday.

Chouhan said Modi’s name has a ‘mantra’. ‘M’ is for ‘motivational’, he said, pointing out that the PM motivates everyone to take India to greater heights. ‘O’, he said, is for ‘opportunity’, and explained that it means that Modiji brings out the nation’s hidden opportunities. ‘D’ is for ‘dynamic leadership’ and, finally, ‘I’ is for ‘Inspire India’.

“Modiji inspires us to make India self-reliant,” he added. Has Modiji taken note of Chouhan’s effort, and is the latter’s chief ministerial kursi safe? After all, it was no secret that before 2014 — which was the year when Modi and his party first came to power — Chouhan was known to be a member of the anti-Modi lobby in the party.

Rising strength

The Congress seems to have bolstered its social media presence. The most tangible evidence of this rising strength is reflected in the results of several recent polls conducted by television channels and journalists explicitly supporting the Narendra Modi government. Twitter polls seeking people’s opinions on Modi’s management of the pandemic and even the performance of the government in the first year of its second term threw up shocking results. While most of the polls indicated dissatisfaction with the Modi government, one conducted by the Union minister, Giriraj Singh, also ran into trouble, putting the government and the BJP through severe embarrassment. Singh had to restrict access to his Twitter account to avoid a defeat.

While the change definitely reflects the inroads being made by the Congress into social media, which was lorded over by Modi’s bhakts for several years, the emergence of freelancers — different groups of Twitter activists who are not affiliated to the Congress but are opposed to Modi — has also helped in turning the tide. Some individuals with very high follower bases have not only disturbed the BJP game on Twitter, but are also mounting pressure on Congress leaders to support them. Even Congress social media warriors complain that senior leaders do not encourage them by following them and retweeting their messages. This has triggered an internal churn, and senior leaders, MPs, MLAs and CMs are being advised to follow and support the social media team.

War ahead

Although Congress leaders, including the former finance minister, P Chidambaram, commented on the latest gross domestic product growth rate of 3.1 per cent and predicted that worse was yet to come, most of them argue in private conversations that the figure is fudged. Many former ministers believe the growth rate has been around 2.5 per cent since the last few quarters, and a deep recession is looming over the country. These leaders are not willing to speak on record on the manipulated data, but the issue is likely to trigger a political war in the future. The former Union minister, Jairam Ramesh, who described even 3.1 per cent as evidence of the government’s incompetence, commented on the observation of the former chief statistician, Pronob Sen, that the latest data was an overestimation by at least Rs 2 lakh crore. “He is one of the most sober and solid and thoroughly professional economists we have.” The endorsement clearly indicated that Ramesh agrees with the assessment of an overestimation. Another former minister said, “We are already into negative growth. The truth cannot be suppressed forever. The fall in revenue and sector-wise growth clearly indicates a situation which is far worse than [is] being projected.” Interestingly, the government is now blaming the pandemic even as the minister of state for finance, Anurag Thakur, repeatedly asserted that Covid-19 will have no impact on India’s economy.Footnote: With a new flyover to be inaugurated, the Karnataka CM, BS Yediyurappa, came under pressure from BJP hardliners to name it after VD Savarkar. When the inauguration coincided with Savarkar’s birth anniversary, none had doubts about the intention of the government. But the Opposition demanding that the flyover be named after a Kannadiga and not after a man who supported British colonialism forced a last-minute cancellation of the inauguration itself.

BS Yediyurappa File picture

Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan File picture

Footnote: With a new flyover to be inaugurated, the Karnataka CM, BS Yediyurappa, came under pressure from BJP hardliners to name it after VD Savarkar. When the inauguration coincided with Savarkar’s birth anniversary, none had doubts about the intention of the government. But the Opposition demanding that the flyover be named after a Kannadiga and not after a man who supported British colonialism forced a last-minute cancellation of the inauguration itself.