Ubalte paani mein chehra saaf dikhai nahi deta (The face cannot be clearly seen in boiling water) — Hindi proverb
The waters, our waters, aren’t still, they remain on the boil, let nobody be persuaded otherwise. They are more on the boil than earlier; this summer’s election verdict stoked the fires under them, that made the waters ripple. It arrested the avarice for absolute power and reduced the ruling party to a minority; it enhanced the Opposition but not nearly enough. It birthed a more level battling field. We are amid jagged lines and puffs of skirmish dust. This is not a time we can clearly see.
We must not rush to judge; in doing so, we risk missing key things, we risk sound judgement, if that is still possible to arrive at in the swirl of dust and boiling water. We must not, for instance, rush to judge the nature of what is being widely called Narendra Modi 3.0 but which may actually be quite something else; it may be NDA 3.0, or the successor digit to whatever number it was that belonged to Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s last government, the government that fell flat on the ground from the skies because it was flying on the imagined wings of Shining India, wings that were more fickle than poor imagination for they were imagined sans sinew. Narendra Modi 2.0, seeking a ‘400 paar’ power cushion, swished perilously close to what happened to the Vajpayee government two decades ago.
But we cannot yet be sure what has resulted from that close call. Has Modi been chastened? Or has he, as many including Sonia Gandhi have credibly suggested, decided to defy the verdict and proceed regardless with his ways and objectives? There are indications and there are contraindications, jagged lines and dust.
Who would have thought that the moment Sheikh Hasina Wazed’s government fell and she fled in distress to India, the government would call an all-party meeting and lay out New Delhi’s position? Such nicety — or necessity — has not been in the playbook of the Modi regime; on the contrary, it seemed that it had mindfully erased such and other good practices of a parliamentary democracy. Who would have thought that the Treasury would swiftly absorb the unease of the Opposition with proposed amendments to the Waqf Act and dribble it off the table and into the care of a joint parliamentary committee? Barrelling on with legislation in the face of the stiffest resistance has been the signature behaviour of the government so far. What’s changed?
The Opposition is all over the government in Parliament since the 18th Lok Sabha convened — mocking, cat-calling, challenging, defying in the most innovative ways. Won’t allow mention of (Mukesh) Ambani and (Gautam) Adani? Well then, fair enough, let’s call them A1 and A2 hereon. As Rahul Gandhi performed that smart pivot, Speaker Om Birla was a sight to behold — wrong-footed, nonplussed, gobsmacked, all of those and more, if that is possible. But why single Birla out? Prime Minister Modi has had a fistful of scorn hurled at him — “Pradhanmantriji dariye mat, sunte jaaiye…” (Be not afraid, Mr Prime Minister, listen to this…) is how Mahua Moitra ribbed him as she began to speak and Modi got up and left the House.
A government on the back foot has been this season’s political signature, as it were. It submitted to averse reaction from allies and clarified it was not interested in carving a creamy layer off the SC/ST ranks. It hurriedly burst the balloon it had floated on lateral entry into the middle and upper bureaucracy. Kangana Ranaut’s libellous babble on agitating farmers was dealt a slap. The arrogant, uncaring romp of a decade and more, is it over and done?
It probably serves well to look back a little for perspective. This is the Modi mode just after this summer’s reversal: “When he arrived at the BJP headquarters in Delhi on the evening of June 4 — his majority lost, his alliance halted short of 300, and his adversaries suddenly swollen in ranks — he arrived in a shower of rose petals and golden confetti, waving to the skies, triumphal, as if he had just returned, not wounded from the battlefield, but having made another consummate conquest. He spoke not with humility at this diminished mandate, issued not a passing nod to the sobering message Indians had sent him; he bragged at length about making history. He laid out his swearing-in like a star-lit extravaganza. When he went to Varanasi for the first time after returning to office, he behaved not as if the city had knocked and dented his crown but as if it had studded more jewels into it. Like a certain emperor and his deceptive delusions with apparel, Modi is able to stay astonishingly cocooned in his DIY phantasms of absolute ubermanship.”
It should be clear to anyone who can tell differences that it will take more than merely an electoral setback to persuade Modi away from his L’État, c’est moi — I am the State — understanding of the world around him. It will take more than just the enhanced acreage of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and town criers heralding the return of liberal pluralism to rein in Modi’s authoritarian unilateralism. What precisely that may require is moot, but it will be far more than the sum of the remarkable turn at the hustings. Halting the march towards cultist majoritarianism will, at the very least, have to remain a consistent work in progress; celebratory bugling over change had better remain in the wings.
Nitish Kumar and N. Chandrababu Naidu haven’t secured special status for their states, Agnipath remains an embraced government scheme, A1 and A2 remain pampered and prosperous, hectoring remains the hallmark tone of the establishment in and outside Parliament, brazenness — such as at the top of SEBI — remains a good badge, the bulldozers are still out there, knocking down the marked ones. Spots, they don’t change; they need erasing.
We may perhaps have a few straws to suggest to us that the widespread expression of disapproval by the electorate — of person and policy, of a drift towards possible absolutism that the binned ‘abki baar 400 paar’ cry underlined — has cast its reflection, but it is not a reflection that is firm or clear. We are amid puffs of dust and jagged lines, our waters are still boiling. Who knows what they might yield?
sankarshan.thakur@abp.in