• Valson Thampu

Daily we are served a heady diet of propagandist advertisement on how the Modi government, inspired and infallible, is driving us to a new haven of power and people’s welfare. We have now a new and simple answer to the old question, ‘What is development?’. Development is what Modi does. Correspondingly, anti-development is whatever the tukde-tukde gang of opposition parties, who botched up the historic India-project, advocate. According to this view of things, India became free only in 2014.
The Modi stint in national governance began with drum-rolling development. Like in the case of Obama’s mystique of ‘change’, soon thereafter adopted by Bengal’s own Mamta, indigenized as poribarthan (parivarthan, that is) the promise of development descended on a people like rain on parched land. The idea was opportune. Electorally it worked brilliantly. But it had a short shelf life. Its usefulness as an election-winner got exhausted in no time. This forced a shift, as BJP’s problem child Subramanian Swami said, from development to the Hindutva card of the communal polarization and majoritarian communal consolidation, now christened as patriotism.
Development was redefined accordingly. It began to be equated with the development of Hindu self-assertion of which the building of Ram Mandir is emotive landmark. This signals the abandonment of development as a secular democratic process as an empirically verifiable entity, questionable on the basis of data. Development became, religiously refashioned, a matter of faith. This offered many advantages. First, it shifted the focus from the people to their leader-as-the-messiah. Nation-building is more like the journey of Israelites from Egypt, the land of bondage, to Canaan. Everything depends on Moses (read, Modi). He decides. He leads. To him nothing is impossible. How does it matter that a journey that should have taken three months takes forty years, and thousands perish in the march?
The second significant advantage in rehashing politics in the mold of religion is what S. T. Coleridge termed ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’ which constitutes political, not less than poetic, faith. That gives an unprecedented, ironic twist to the proffered ‘minimum government, maximum governance’ -a concept purloined from Henry David Thoreau. From politics-as-religion governmental accountability evaporates. No matter how barren and lackluster your governance, you can govern for as long as you retain the aura of the religio-political Messiah. This makes millions of people endure with patient forbearance their hardships. India is shining, but the vast majority of the people are not. Surely, the 800 million poor that Modi advertises cannot be sitting around the bountiful table of national prosperity. In the clear and courageous words of the late V. R. Krishna Iyer, we are forgetting a billion people for the sake of a few billionaires. Count the number of India’s blue-eyed billionaires, you feel we are streaming our way to the Mars of hyper development. Count the number of the poor that surround them nation-wide, you begin to doubt what you hear.
Already there is a growing disjunction between governance and electoral charisma. Perhaps this is due to the role that religion plays in politics. To see an aspect of how this magic plays out consider an example. Modi and BJP abhor Parivar politics. Good. So, mother-and-son are to them like a piece of red cloth to a Spanish bull. It appeals to our democratic ethos that discountenances birth-based privileges. It is manifestly unfair that you have to be conceived in the right womb to hit the top any time. But what if the BJP works the Parivar mode after its own fashion. Why were Anil Antony and Padmaja lured into the BJP? Because of their individual political worth, or because of their political ancestry? Both of them got into BJP because of their fathers. But, that is not Parivar politics. The reason? Well, because it is BJP that is practising it. And it is axiomatic that BJP, under Modi, is pure and infallible. It is not that Modi does what is right. It is that right is whatever Modi does. That is a religious sentiment and it betokens political deification.
Look again at this religion-facilitated inversion of the democratic vision. One man driving a people to a destination which he alone knows and decides, in which citizens march like sheep driven to whichever destination, is hardly democratic! See how the religious outlook legitimizes such a scheme of things. Religion foregrounds ‘faith’. On the ground, faith becomes ‘blind faith’ in the one who is the Messiah at hand. This breeds the idea of political necessity. There is no other way. This sustains the idea of Modi’s invincibility, which is now at a point where elections become superfluous for being entirely predictable in their results. How does the religious outlook aid and abet this? Well, religion induces an attitude of resignation. By promoting self-denial and romanticizing patient endurance in anticipation of mega compensation in the world to come (in Modi’s phraseology, long-term gains), people are conditioned to pay no heed to their present plight. They allow their life to be molded by circumstances. They get used to whatever is done to them from time to time. Endure this short-term pain for the sake of long-term gains: they are ready and willing. Even grateful. As the former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, quoting Keynes, ‘in the long-term, we all are dead’!
So, electoral politics in our midst has come to be the art of anaesthetizing the people in terms of their present pains by feeding them the opium of long-term gains. For a people inured to enduring lifelong deprivation for the longest-term gain of life after death, it is not a big deal to have to wait and wait, a few more years, may be a few more decades, for the dawn of good days (accha din). For, what worse tragedy can befall a people languishing in deprivation than the death of their hope?
So, let us hope. Even hope against hope. All the same, let us not forget that developing a nation, without developing its people, is mere moonshine in Alice’s wonderland.