The News
January 24, 2009
Modi’s lies and the BJP leadership crisis
by Praful Bidwai
It’s nauseating that some of India’s topmost businessmen have stooped to orchestrating a campaign to make Gujarat’s Narendra Milosevic Modi India’s Prime Minister. Barely two months ago, businessmen had made Modi their poster-boy at the opening of the Vibrant Gujarat Global Investors’ Summit. They included the Ambani brothers, Adi and Jamshyd Godrej, and many others.
At the Summit’s conclusion last fortnight, Ratan Tata led corporate honchos in lavishing praise upon Modi: “Under Mr Modi’s leadership, Gujarat is head and shoulders above any [other] state.” A state normally takes 90 to 180 days to clear a new plant but, gushed Tata, the Nano car project got its “approval in just two days.’’
One might wonder about the rationality of this speed which isn’t enough even to evaluate a project’s fiscal, land-use or environmental implications. However, that didn’t prevent Tata from famously hugging Modi, or Anil Ambani and Sunil Mittal from declaring him India’s future Prime Minister who would run the nation like a corporate CEO.
The sell-Modi campaign has nothing to do with Gujarat’s development record, but is explained by three factors. Indian businessmen, faced with a domestic and global economic slowdown, feel insecure, and crave for order, authoritarianism, protection via blatantly partisan bailouts and brazenly pro-business policies of the Modi variety. Second, they are lured by the Modi-Tata Nano model of government-business collusion. That model means subsidies on a Rs 2,000-crore investment totalling Rs 30,000 crores over 20 years, including a Rs 9,750-crore loan at 0.1% interest, exemption from 15% VAT, stamp-duty waiver and subsidised land. The subsidies work out to an astounding 60% of the car’s promised price of Rs 100,000! This is not capitalism, but predatory risk-averse feudal jagirdari. Third, there has been a massive degeneration in Indian business culture since neoliberal policies were launched in 1991. Pampered businessmen exploit their political connections to profiteer and loot the exchequer criminally, as Satyam and other recent scams illustrate.
In candid self-reflection, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, president of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, says that liberalisation hasn’t produced “a new type” of entrepreneur with “good corporate governance and honesty…Actually, the reverse is true… increased opportunities and … political influence … on the creation of wealth [have] created more greed and far too many corporates [who cheat]. This is the ugly side of liberalisation”, attributable to weak enforcement of “deliberately ambiguous” regulation. India’s greedy, profit-obsessed Big Business is now whitewashing the butchery of 2000 Muslims over which Modi presided in 2002 and is sanctifying his communal authoritarianism and contempt for the rule of law.
What of Modi’s claims about Gujarat’s stellar development? Gujarat attracts investment not because of its dynamic policies but a historical accident--business invested there early on and it has a fairly developed infrastructure. But now, it lags behind Orissa and Andhra in investment.
Contrary to Modi’s claim that 61% of investment promises were implemented between 2003 and 2007, Gujarat’s Industries Commissioner has revealed that only 21% were so translated. Gujarat’s industries aren’t doing well. Diamond workers are committing suicide and their children are dropping out of school. In the past year, over 60,000 small and medium enterprises have shut down. Gujarat has higher per capita debt than UP or Bihar. Agrarian distress has driven hundreds of farmers to suicide. In social sector spending as a proportion of public expenditure, Gujarat ranks a lowly 19 among India’s 21 major states.
As its official Human Development Report (2004) points out, “Gujarat has reached only 48 percent of the goals set for human development”. Its human development ranks have fallen in recent years. Although it’s Number 4 among all states in per capita income, it has fallen to Number 6 in education, Number 9 in health, and Number 12 in participation.
According to the National Family Health Survey, child malnutrition incidence in Gujarat is 47%, higher than the national average. Its proportion of stunted children under 3 years is 42%. An alarming 80% of Gujarati children between 6 and 35 months are anaemic. Gujarat has seen a steady decline in learning indicators. Only 59.6% of its rural children (Class 3-5) can read Class 1-level text (all-India average, 66.6). Only 43.1% could do subtraction (national average, 54.9). Gujarat similarly lags behind in the percentage of children who can recognise numbers, tell the time or do currency tasks. Gujarat is frighteningly patriarchal. Its female-male sex-ratio is an abysmal 487:1000 in the 0-4 age-group and 571 in the 5-9 group (national averages, 515 and 632). Gujarat’s health indices are barely higher than Orissa’s, HDR co-author Darshini Mahadevia told me.
According to environmentalist Rohit Prajapati and economist Trupti Shah, some 5 million livelihoods have been lost in Gujarat owing to water-related, mining and industrial projects--a very high 10% of the population. Gujarat has India’s highest number of pollution “hot spots”. Groundwater is contaminated in 74 out of its 184 tehsils with salinity, chlorides, heavy metals, and persistent organic pollutants. The industries that have flourished the most in Gujarat are all highly hazardous: poisonous chemicals--Vapi is the world’s fourth most toxic hub--, textile dyeing, shipbreaking, and diamond polishing. In Gujarat, labour rights are virtually nonexistent. On minimum wages, it ranks eighth among Indian states.
This, then, is the story of Modi’s “dynamic leadership”. Big Business’s clamour to make him the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial nominee badly rattled LK Advani. Modi had to clarify that Advani would be the candidate. But the controversy has strengthened Modi’s claim to be Advani’s political successor--the undisputed Number Two in the BJP.
Modi’s clarification hasn’t fully settled the BJP’s leadership issue. Former Vice President of India Bhairon Singh Shekhawat says he wants to contest the next Lok Sabha election--in violation of the convention that constitutional office-holders shouldn’t return to competitive politics. Shekhawat has let it be known that being 5 years older than Advani, he considers himself his senior.
Even if Shekhawat stands down, the disquiet his move has generated is bound to further affect the BJP’s morale. As will the resignation of Kalyan Singh, which deprives the party of its pre-eminent OBC leader in the Hindi heartland. This is liable to hit BJP in the 11 Lok Sabha constituencies of Uttar Pradesh in which Singh’s Lodh caste matters.
The BJP was extremely upbeat politically a year ago, but finds itself on the defensive after the Assembly election defeats in Rajasthan and Delhi. The National Democratic Alliance, which once boasted of 24 member-parties, is now down to just 7 members, 3 of them small. The BJP’s most important ally, the Janata Dal (United), has distanced itself from it on issues of communalism, the Hindutva terror network centred on Pragya Singh and Lt Col Prasad Shrikant Purohit, and the new National Investigation Agency Act and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment Act. The BJP’s crisis of strategy is compounded by the fact that the RSS has tightened its grip on its organisation just when the party thinks it must give the appearance of moderation and inclusiveness, rather than Hindutva extremism. This is the right moment for the secular parties to take on the BJP--if only they could muster the will and the strategy.
The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and peace and human-rights activist based in Delhi. Email: prafulbidwai1@yahoo.co.in
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