The foreign aid and foreign hand problem

First Published: The New Indian Express | 05 March 2025
Link: https://www.newindianexpress.com/amp/story/opinions/2025/Mar/04/the-foreign-aid-and-foreign-hand-problem

Election Commissioner and the separation of powers

First Published: The New Indian Express | 21 February 2025
Link: https://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/2025/Feb/20/rooting-for-distinct-branches-on-a-strong-tree

Why is Modi calling Rahul an 'Urban Naxal'?

First Published: The Times of India+ | 12 February 2025

Link: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-plus/politics/why-is-modi-trying-to-paint-rahul-gandhi-as-an-urban-naxal/articleshow/118148636.cms

 

Last week, in his address to the two houses of parliament on the motion of thanks to the President’s address,  Prime Minister Narendra Modi was unrelenting when it came to the Congress party and its top leadership. Did he have to be that way? Why did he have to be that way? Especially, when the electoral fortunes of the Congress party has been depleting election after election since the 2024 general election. 

 

In other words, the space they occupy in the minds and hearts of the electorates has found no particular reason and emotion to expand since they got 99 in June 2024 with a 21.19 percent vote share. The results to the legislative assemblies in Haryana, Maharashtra and now, Delhi, have embarrassed the Congress party. They had a fair chance in all three assemblies but they have been dominated by either the regional players or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). 

 

Of course, when the prime minister spoke in the two houses, the Delhi results were not out, but it had become obvious that the contest was between the Aam Admi Party (AAP) and the BJP. There was a clear anticipation of the AAP’s applecart being overturned. Yet, Modi did not focus on the anticipated victory in Delhi, or any other noisy and troublesome political opponent or ideological grouping in the country, but on the Congress party and its leadership. One may wonder if he was deriving vicarious pleasure in flogging the proverbial dead horse or was it much deeper than that?

 

From what Modi spoke, it appeared that he had begun to treat the Congress party as not just a mainstream political opponent but as an ideological grouping. In fact, it had become less of a political party and more of an ideological grouping if one were to read his words carefully. This was a new shift. For Modi, the Congress did not just conveniently wear an ideological mask to serve its political expediency, but was transforming itself into a dangerous ideological grouping. That is what he perhaps meant when he deployed among other things the phrase ‘urban Naxal’ repeatedly. Till he used the phrase this time in parliament, and gave it a kind of state sanction, it was more a pedestrian jibe of the right wing intelligentsia. 

 

Some may argue that Modi formalised the ‘urban Naxal’ charge because Rahul Gandhi had given him an opportunity to do so. In mid-January, Rahul had said that the Congress was not fighting a “fair fight” against a political organisation, but was fighting “the BJP, the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] and the Indian state itself” because the two had captured “every single institution in the country”. 

 

Rahul had also added that Modi wanted to “crush the voice” of the nation by gagging Dalits, minorities, backward classes and tribals. Therefore, in parliament, it appeared, Modi was returning the compliment. He tried to stop seeing the Congress as a political opponent but primarily as an ideological body, which had made its intent clear about “waging a war against the state”. Mainstream, centrist, political parties usually carry a certain flexibility of engagement within them, use a more reconciliatory language, but the Congress had become bitter, intransigent and exclusive. 

 

When Modi spoke of Naxals in parliament, it seemed to bring back memories of the 1960s and the 1970s, when overthrowing the state through an armed revolution was a serious preoccupation of Maoists grouped in West Bengal’s Naxalbari. The likes of Charu Mazumdar and Kanu Sanyal had kept this flame of revolution alive when India was struggling to deepen its democratic roots. That revolution had been crushed by the Congress under Indira Gandhi with help from Siddhartha Shankar Ray, who incidentally had also helped her during the emergency too. Even during the emergency, the excuse that Indira Gandhi made was that there was an attempt to overthrow the state. But now her grandson, in Modi’s perception, was appropriating the language of Naxals.

 

None had spoken of “fighting the Indian state” in mainstream political discourse since the 1970s. The thought had only remained a fringe pestilential infestation in a democratic state. Therefore areas “infested” by Naxals were routinely combed and cleared. That was and is the language in circulation. This combing and clearing had happened during the Sonia Gandhi-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime too, between 2004 and 2014. Rahul Gandhi was supposed to adopt this uncontested line and language, but he was ‘caught’ speaking their language. There was no clarification if he had slipped in his use of language, or if he had spoken unthinkingly when he referred to fighting the Indian state.

 

As if to double down on this mid-January remark, when Rahul Gandhi spoke in parliament in the debate of thanks to the president’s address in the first week of February, he constantly invoked the China economic example to expose or ‘belittle’ India’s economic progress. The China growth story is a modern marvel but it may have been the wrong analogy of a nation, politically, for Rahul Gandhi to pick. That is because, only six months ago, he had campaigned hard on the theme of ‘saving democracy’ and saving India’s liberal constitution, and China could claim neither democracy nor a liberal guide book. 

 

Most of China’s economic progress was a result of its deep authoritarian remoulding of a nation. Its economic status it is largely agreed had come at the cost of its political freedoms and human freedoms. Therefore, if Rahul Gandhi was trying to be a champion of such freedoms in India, he could have avoided picking China as an example. After his “fighting the state” remark he seemed to have unwittingly entrenched himself in Maoist barracks by bringing up China in his parliament speech. Interestingly, in the previous session, Rahul Gandhi was presented as a ‘puppet’ of a ‘capitalist conspirator’ called George Soros’ by the BJP. This time the narrative had changed, essentially because of Rahul Gandhi’s disabilities with political language and a well thought through political idiom.

 

When Modi has been propagating to the world about the greatness of the Indian civilisation, when Donald Trump’s election has been about ‘Making America Great Again’, Rahul Gandhi should have carefully read the hyper-nationalist rhetoric and chronicling taking place across the globe and worked on his political idiom. He should not have said anything that could be whittled down to mean, ‘China is great’. And whittling down is what political opponents do. Rahul Gandhi from the very beginning of his political career has had a romance with the image of a ‘disruptor’, both within and outside his party. Even the spiritual discourse he manages in the middle of his political utterances puts Shiva, the mythological destroyer and disruptor, at the centre. 

 

When Modi spoke in parliament, he was speaking after the union budget had courted the middle classes with large income tax concessions. At this juncture, Rahul Gandhi was perhaps trying to say that the growth the middle classes anticipate as a result of new budgetary measures may not be as big as it is being made out to be, but still to bring in the China comparison was not about the shortfall of gains and growth, but in Modi’s savage oration it was an ideological affinity. 

 

To this noise of a debate, the right wing discourse may attribute Rahul Gandhi’s absence at the Republic Day parade; his ‘non-constructive’ engagement with the government; his larger provocations on voting machines and electoral rolls, to a typical Naxal playbook, which attempts to exasperate the state. It simply provokes the state into extreme reaction, like his grandmother was said to have been provoked to proclaim the emergency in 1975 by forces against the state. 

 

Rahul Gandhi has also been trying hard to cultivate an audience of the poor and marginalised. Whether he will be successful eventually or not is a different matter, but that was reason enough for Modi to ask if there had ever been three members of a family from either the Scheduled Caste of Schedule Tribe communities in parliament at the same time. This was Modi’s way of mocking the self-interest of the Gandhi-Nehru family being their alleged national interest. This was also his way of trying to sending out a signal to those audiences that the overtures that the Congress party was making were fake. 

 

If Modi’s message is successful then Rahul Gandhi may not have the masses on his side to ‘overthrow the state’, so to say. Besides the civilisational agenda, Modi is also aggressively courting the constitution agenda for this very reason. Since there exists a theoretical possibility that the Congress party and the Nehru-Gandhi family may still manage a groundswell of support, either through their own ingenuity or through the generosity of their allies who allow them to survive in a few states, Modi wants to extinguish the possibility of such a revival now or in the future, but he is not using the slogan of his first term — “Congress mukt Bharat”. Congress is after all the only party at the moment that can claim a national footprint. 

 

When Modi asked about members of one family in parliament, he stopped short of asking an obvious third question. He did not ask if three people from a backward class (OBC) family were ever together in parliament. He did not perhaps want to upset the Yadavs in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where the elections are next, or the Gowdas of Karnataka. That was the beginning of a new strategy to alienate the Congress from its allies and potential allies, and the mainstream of politics. ###

BJP's southern fort besieged from within

First Published: The New Indian Express | 05 February 2025
Link: https://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/2025/Feb/04/bjps-southern-fort-besieged-from-within

Rustin the true inheritor of Gandhi's mantle in the US

First Published: The Times of India+ | 31 January 2025
Link: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-plus/international/why-rustin-not-mlk-is-the-true-inheritor-of-gandhis-mantle-in-us/articleshow/117635448.cms

Has the Opposition INDIA bloc entered 2025 without an agenda?

First Published: The Times of India+ | 14 January 2025
Link: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-plus/politics/has-the-opposition-india-bloc-begun-2025-without-an-agenda/articleshow/117239628.cms

The news of Jeremy's death and other departures

 

First published: Scroll.in | 29 December 2024
Link: https://scroll.in/article/1077313/jeremy-seabrook-1939-2024-writer-with-a-unique-blend-of-reason-and-emotion