We are no longer in the Modi era. We are in the age of Amit Shah. And it’s not looking good for India.
The events at Jawaharlal Nehru University have been so egregious that even neutral people, those who usually don’t comment on politics or take a position against the Narendra Modi government, are speaking up. You could say Deepika Padukone was always a bad apple because she said nice things about Rahul Gandhi 10 years ago, but what explains Varun Dhawan?
We have all seen how the JNU attackers were escorted out by the Delhi Police, and how the police is filing FIRs against the victims and remains mum against the aggressors. It’s a bit like the Kathua rape and murder, where the moral case is too weak to be defended by spin-doctoring and fake news.
But the government won’t budge. No matter what happens, Amit Shah has decided it is bad politics to be seen admitting a mistake. Whether it is the fear-mongering he himself carried out over the link between the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the National Register of Citizens, whether it is the alienation of the Shiv Sena or handling student protests, Amit Shah won’t budge.
This movie has played many times before. A government that gets a second consecutive term in power is overcome with hubris and makes one mistake after another. Remember UPA-2?
At least UPA-2 showed it was worried about the backlash. The Modi-Shah government is looking worse, as if it seeks to wilfully spread anarchy.
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King of all he surveys
And yet, sometimes, even Amit Shah has to budge.
An early sign of a renewed hubris was when Shah said on Hindi Diwas in September 2019 that Hindi should become India’s link language. He was merely reiterating the RSS point of view that Hindi could do the job of a link language better than English. But surely, a politician supposedly as astute as Amit Shah should have known about how that thought is anathema in south India? And that him saying so would be suicidal at a time when his party is trying to expand into the south?
Such political considerations no longer seem to matter for Amit Shah. He seems to think that with 303 seats in the Lok Sabha for the BJP, India is now a clean slate for him to write on. There’s no one left to utter so much as a whimper. Shah is the king of all he surveys. If not now, then when shall we build the Hindu Rashtra?
And yet the backlash was severe enough that Shah had to backtrack his statement and Modi had to go around speaking in various Indian languages from Houston to Chennai.
In another supposedly misunderstood point, Shah questioned multi-party democracy. That sounds like being rather blunt about the BJP’s desire to have a one-party rule.
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How BJP loses
Meanwhile, we no longer hear of the BJP’s “well-oiled election machinery”. After the 2014 elections, Brand Modi was so strong that together with Amit Shah’s Chankayniti and celebrated booth management, the BJP was winning election after election. Jharkhand, Haryana, Maharashtra were all a cakewalk. We were told that the standard conventions of Indian politics — anti-incumbency, being nice to regional parties, having a CM face — did not apply to the BJP.
Come 2019 and the old conventions were back. Has the famed Chanakyaniti been lost to hubris?
A long view of Amit Shah’s performance in state elections tells us that it is a little over-rated. He lost Delhi and Bihar, he couldn’t win Karnataka in 2018 and nearly lost Gujarat in 2017. He lost he BJP bastion of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and no, he couldn’t change the Rajasthan dynamic of alternating between the BJP and the Congress. The dry run has continued with the interregnum of the Lok Sabha victory, for which some would credit Balakot more than Amit Shah. After the 303 seats in the Lok Sabha, we are back to seeing a middling performance of the BJP in state elections.
It was nothing but hubris that prevented the BJP from forming government in Maharashtra despite winning a majority for its pre-poll alliance.
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Brand Modi in the age of Shah
This hubris has been enabled by a weak opposition and a pliant media. Together, they made sure the government narrative on the abrogation of Article 370 and the Supreme Court judgment on Ram Mandir are bought without much questioning.
Yet, on Kashmir, the government may still be riding a tiger it doesn’t know how to dismount. On CAA-NRC, the Modi-Shah government seems to think anything is fair in the egotistical campaign to win a small state assembly election in West Bengal. The hubris made the government think protests will fizzle out in a week. A month later, it is the government that keeps giving more reasons for the people to protest.
When Modi won the first time in 2014, he went about launching one scheme after another, one event after another. In 2019, Modi seems to have passed the baton to Amit Shah. Modi makes himself conspicuous by his absence in Parliament when Amit Shah is reading the riot act on the Hindutva agenda.
Yet Shah’s aggression is affecting brand Modi now. In Modi’s first term, he could divert attention with his event management and by launching welfare schemes. So, when people questioned Modi’s silence on lynching or an attack on students, he was able to just give them something else to chew on.
But now, Modi has no new lollipops to give, the economy is in the doldrums. It is the age of Shah, whose actions are costing Modi his balancing act even on the international stage. Shah’s poor handling of the CAA issue in Assam has meant that Modi has had to cancel two visits to Guwahati now: one for the summit with Japan’s Shinzo Abe and one to inaugurate Khelo India.
At some point, Modi will need to step in for his own sake, tell Amit Shah to take it easy. Hindu Rashtra, like Rome, needn’t be built in a day.
Views are personal.