Modi vs Modi

Dubai eye
If, as Harold Wilson suggested, a week is a long time in politics, a year must be an eternity. It took less than a week to rip the veneer of moral invincibility of the Narendra Modi government, bringing it down from its high horse of holier-than-thou hubris and righteous swagger.
Whatever happened to the ever tweeting, ever pontificating prime minister? Cat got his tongue? Someone who perpetually taunted and mocked his predecessor for his inscrutable silences (‘Maun Maun Singh!) and rode home to victory promising a crusade against corruption has yet to speak on the issue of Lalit Modi, the highflying, corrupt cricket tycoon who has shamed the Indian government.
The maelstrom unleashed by his namesake has not just sucked in Modi’s top ministers and the chief minister of Rajasthan, one of the country’s biggest states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, but is threatening his own standing and image.
Yet the governing BJP and its top ministers remain curiously blasé about the whole affair.
Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj, no less, ignoring the numerous charges and cases against the former IPL boss goes all out to lobby the British government for travel papers to the fugitive and offender wanted by her own government. Adding to the farce is the fact that her husband and daughter have for years been part of the defence team of Lalit Modi! And Rajasthan’s BJP chief minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia has the gall to file a sworn affidavit before the UK authorities requesting asylum for him in the name of “political victimisation and vendetta by the Indian government”.
Even as this ever fascinating, sordid saga unfolds, Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani – with education being her main brief, mind you – is caught lying to the election commission about her various ‘degrees’!
And we are not even talking about the all too familiar shenanigans of the ‘Supreme Leader,’ as Rajdeep Sardesai calls him in his latest book by the same name, when he had been the chief minister of Gujarat.
From the 2002 pogrom to staged encounters and witch hunt of innocent people implicated in cooked up terrorism cases, there is a long and dark trail that follows the fastest journey from Gujarat to Delhi.
Yet a scam-weary India fell for the fiction of a clean, incorruptible and no nonsense leader, hook, line and sinker. It didn’t seem to matter that one-third of the BJP members of parliament are facing criminal charges and over a fifth face serious criminal charges including murder, rioting and rape.
Why, even federal ministers have rape and rioting cases pending against them, not to mention worthies like Giriraj Singh who threatened to send all Modi critics to Pakistan and Sadhvi Jyoti who in the recent Delhi elections warned against voting for ‘Haramzade’, her euphemism for Muslims.
Yet the BJP has the audacity to lecture everyone else about ‘nationalism’ and probity in public life. So much for being the ‘party with a difference’!
So how does the Supreme Leader respond to the unprecedented crisis facing his government in the Lalit gate? Modi wouldn’t mind sending Sushma Swaraj into political wilderness. Especially given the fact that before he hijacked the BJP’s prime ministerial campaign, she was considered the most natural and charismatic choice for the leadership of the party and government.
In any case, who needs a foreign minister when the jet-setting prime minister himself has taken upon himself to do her job including travelling to the length and breadth of the globe. No wonder Sushma has seldom been seen with the Supreme Leader during his dozen and half foreign trips in the past 13 months. With her safely out of the way, another potential challenger from within would be taken care of.
Yet the BJP veteran is not without her share of supporters within the Sangh Parivar, especially in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent and deity of the governing party.
Besides, it is unlikely that the foreign minister would have thrown her weight around to help Lalit Modi without the knowledge and blessings of the prime minister whose ties with the cricket tycoon go way back, to the days when he as the chief minister headed the Gujarat Cricket Association. So if Sushma is sent packing, she is not the type to go without a fight, singing like a canary all the way about a la affaire Lalit Modi and who asked her to help the fugitive.
The same is more or less true of the Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje who not only directly helped the cricket world’s bad boy get residency in the UK but got rewarded handsomely for the help.
Despite the clinching evidence of her signed statement surfacing, the powerful Rajasthan chief minister remains as defiant as Sushma. She has apparently threatened to split the party if she is forced to quit.
Meanwhile the man who invented the fantastic Indian Premier League with its big bucks, oomph and glamour himself has been singing and laughing all the way at the broken system back home even as he holidays with the likes of Paris Hilton in picturesque locales around the world.
But if the tainted ministers are allowed to continue, the year-old BJP government will find itself in serious trouble. Lalit-gate seems to have given a new lease of life to the Congress and unity of purpose to the divided opposition. It has tasted blood and is unlikely to rest until it has the scalps of Sushma, Vasundhara and perhaps even Modi’s favourite minister Smriti Irani. And when the shit hits the fan, those at the top may not for long remain insulated.
So it is quite an existential dilemma for the party that rode home to power on a wave of popular outrage against sleaze and continuing Congress inaction and incompetence in the face of multiple crises.
Would the electorate forgive a government that promised to change all that? Faced with the charges of blatant abuse of power, impropriety and corruption, the BJP government demonstrates a brazenness that the Congress couldn’t quite manage despite presiding over a series of scams and disasters.
What Lalit Modi has done is not just landed the Modi government and its top ministers in a jam with fingers being pointed at the prime minister and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley themselves, he has exposed the entire political class in various stages of undress. And it is not a pretty sight to behold. Be it the BJP, Congress or NCP, the cricket world’s answer to Don Corleone has friends in every party.
In the words of Shobha De, Lalit-gate has rendered one of the other Modi’s campaign promises hollow: “Sorry Narendra bhai. Log khaaengey bhi, aur khilayenge bhi. That is how it works in our Bharat Mahaan.”
But believe it or not, as Sandip Roy argues in Firstpost, Lalit Modi may be the best thing to have happened to politics in India. Even if no high-placed heads roll and the BJP manages to survive the raging storm, we must thank Lalit Modi for exposing and rocking the cosy back-scratching world of the corporate-political nexus and greed. Indian politics could do with a few more Lalit Modis. If the Supreme Leader does not watch out, Modi may turn out to be the nemesis of Modi.
The writer is a Middle East based columnist.
Email: aijaz.syed@hotmail.com