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Friday March 29, 2024

Is the party over for Modi?

By Aijaz Zaka Syed
October 08, 2017

Has the tide finally started turning against Narendra Modi and his BJP? Only months ago, the prime minister – whose meteoric rise in the face of numerous court cases and other odds surprised everyone – appeared invincible. Earlier this year, the spectacular victory of his party in Uttar Pradesh – despite the all-round devastation left behind by the so-called demonetisation – left everyone stunned. It seemed as if nothing and no one could beat the man from Gujarat. And adding to his legend of invincibility has been the massive propaganda machine that works 24/7 and has helped his effortless leap from Gujarat to Delhi.

Not any longer. They say a week is a long time in politics and six months like an eternity. It is amazing how fast things can change and change the fortunes of even the most powerful. BJP veteran Yashwant Sinha’s attack on finance minister Arun Jaitley in his Indian Express article seems to have set the cat among the pigeons. The veteran BJP leader, who has served the country in various capacities – including a stint as the foreign minister – is respected for his integrity.

Jaitley may contemptuously dismiss the former finance minister as yet another aspirant for his job, but even he knows that every argument in Sinha’s powerful critique is spot on. Besides, what the former finance minister has articulated is not just the view of a small, disgruntled group within the ruling party but reflects the growing sentiment of the majority across the country.

You had to be blind to not see that demonetisation has been an unmitigated economic disaster – in the words of Sinha. Yet, the BJP’s Orwellian propaganda machine managed to perpetuate the myth that it had been introduced to go after the rich and the hoarders of black money and that, in the end, all will be well. Especially when some of that windfall of ‘black money’ is shared with the nation’s poor.

It is this fiction that partly helped India’s patient multitudes silently suffer a nightmare which lasted for months and destroyed millions and millions of lives and livelihoods. Small businesses have been destroyed forever. Millions and millions of people in cities and towns across the country, especially those in unorganised sector are still without jobs. Farmers couldn’t find cash to even buy seeds. And nearly a year after demonetisation, the country is still reeling from its devastating effects. The nightmare is far from over. Many ATMs in my part of the city back home still have no cash.

And just when people were beginning to find their feet and stand up all over again, the government came up with this thing called the goods and services tax (GST) and wreaked economic havoc once again.

Those who survived demonetisation have been brought down by the GST. Originally conceived by PM Manmohan Singh and once bitterly opposed by Modi, the GST may have been a good idea to start with to unify tax regimes of the centre and various states. However, the crude, haphazard manner in which it has been implemented by this government – not to mention the exorbitant ratio of tax that brings everything and everyone under the incredibly complex tax system – has overwhelmed everyone.

As a result, the prices of the bare essentials of life have shot up, fuelling inflation on the one hand and bringing the world’s fastest economy to a grinding halt on the other. Instead of registering growth, the Indian economy has now declined for six quarters in a row.

As Sinha puts in his Indian Express piece: “Private investment has shrunk as never before in two decades, industrial production has all but collapsed, agriculture is in distress, construction industry, a big employer of the work force, is in the doldrums, the rest of the service sector is also in the slow lane, exports have dwindled, sector after sector of the economy is in distress, demonetisation has proved to be an unmitigated economic disaster, a badly conceived and poorly implemented GST has played havoc with businesses and sunk many of them and countless millions have lost their jobs”.

Trashing both Modi and Jaitley, the senior BJP leader concludes: “The prime minister claims that he has seen poverty from close quarters. His finance minister is working overtime to make sure that all Indians also see it from equally close quarters”.

No wonder Sinha’s attack has got the ruling party into quite a fit – especially considering his son Jayant Sinha is Jaitley’s junior minister. The government even fielded him to counter his father in yet another article in the Times of India. However, the damage has already been done.

This may just be the beginning of the end. As the economic mess in the country deepens in the days and months ahead and the pain being felt by those at the bottom is shared by everyone else, these voices of dissent would turn into vox populi.

It looks like the economy may eventually prove the fatal chink in our hero’s armour.

Even the BJP’s patron deity RSS has started distancing itself from the Modinomics, acknowledging that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. In his annual Dusserah speech, RSS chief Bhagwat even called for a “new economic model”.

Considering this government came promising achche din (good times) – it has had a good run and incredible luck of low oil prices, not to mention the public euphoria – the bad news on the economic front must be frustrating. Especially when the 2019 elections are less than two years away.

Indeed, the silent, sane majority looked the other way while the Parivar and its numerous outfits played havoc with the law and order and various institutions, unleashing a reign of terror against religious minorities and Dalits. Intolerance has been the order of the day with intellectuals, journalists and everyone else who does not share the saffron worldview being silenced. Scores of Muslims have been beaten to death in the name of the holy cow and other sacred excuses, in full view of the state and its law-enforcement agencies.

The man at the top – ever prompt to commiserate with victims of terror and violence around the world – has yet to condemn these killings, let alone rein in the killers. Instead of going after those who were responsible for the killings, the state has actually penalised the families of the victims!

Yet the rich and powerful and the middle classes ignored these antics of the Parivar. Indeed, they have silently nodded their approval – probably viewing it all as some kind of justification for what Modi calls “1,200 years of slavery”.

Besides, who cares as long as the economy is doing well and everyone is enjoying the good times, believing that we have finally arrived as a great world power? What happens when the fun stops though? Would the euphoric middle classes and the rich supporters of the BJP continue to cheer for it when achche din turn into not-so-good times? I doubt it.

If reports from the PM’s home state are anything to go by, the BJP has serious reasons to worry. Ravaged first by demonetisation and then the GST, Gujarat’s mercantile classes are apparently in no mood to vote for the BJP. If this is the state of affairs in Gujarat – Hindutva’s laboratory – one can imagine the mood of the nation. Another sign of the nation’s mood is the humiliating defeat that the ABVP – the BJP’s student wing – has suffered in the polls at universities across India – from JNU and Delhi to Hyderabad and Lucknow. Looks like the party is over for Modi.

The writer is an award-winning journalist.

Email: aijaz.syed@hotmail.com