India needs a Modi vs Rahul Gandhi debate. It will challenge govt, reveal Opposition’s plans

Narendra Modi’s population rhetoric is confusing and contradicts his government’s policies. A debate would bring some clarity to it.

File photo of Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi | ANI

The Americanisation of our lives is a feature of the unipolar world we now live in. The directness of Americana’s grotesqueness is seductive. It is, as people have noted, akin to a car crash one cannot stop staring at. US politics, especially, belongs to this category. Depending on their views, one may either call it an extreme trivialisation or true democratisation. One of the greatest exports of America has been this vein of televised politics as a team sport. The presidential debates happen to be this sport’s Super Bowl.

Even the British, who for a long time held their traditions of the Westminster system dear, gave in, and started having debates between prime ministerial candidates. Naturally, several Indian journalists have dreamt of following the same in India. Recently, former Supreme Court judge Madan B Lokur, former Delhi High Court Chief Justice Ajit P Shah and senior journalist N Ram invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to “a public debate on a non partisan and non commercial platform”. While Gandhi agreed to participate, PM Modi has not, so we likely won’t have a debate. Instead, we have political rallies where politicians get to say anything, and they do, often making statements that have no basis in fact. 

One useful feature of these debates is that they reveal whether politicians understand the costs of the policies they propose. Most policies that rise up to the level of consideration of either an incumbent or a prospective prime minister will have benefits; that is not in question. The trick in a democracy, especially one as large and diverse as India, is to make sure that policymakers understand the trade-offs that all such policies are bound to have.

Centre-state relations, policymaking

Consider Modi’s recent statements about public transportation. He claimed that providing free bus tickets to women, as Chennai, Bangalore, New Delhi, and Hyderabad have done, is detrimental to the ridership of metro trains, and therefore their economic viability. This wades into policymaking on urban planning, which is one of the most critical areas of public policy in the coming decades. 

We have a rapidly urbanising population at a time when climate change and its serious effects pose a difficult challenge. How we decide to develop our civic infrastructure will determine how cities evolve. And how cities evolve will determine whether we are sustainable. Free public transport is essential for building dense living with lower emissions. The fear of one mode of public transport cannibalising another is moot if sustainability is the goal. It is worse to pit free tickets for poor women against metro systems, which are loss-making in every city in India anyway. 

On the other hand, a status quo bias that encourages private vehicle ownership and ignores the negative externalities of emissions in accounting and ROI has a certain Reaganesque appeal to it. It will, however, result in urban sprawl and make car ownership a goal and necessity of life. One can reasonably argue both sides, but each must be aware of the costs of the other. A debate would have hopefully brought that out.

Another frequent rhetorical point that Modi likes to address is regarding people who have many children and how society should deal with them. Regardless of whether he means Muslims, as the popular press seems to think, this raises an important question that goes to the heart of an intractable issue that the Union of India stares at in the next decade.

If we want to cover the religious angle, Rajasthan—a state with a Muslim population of less than 10 per cent—had the highest population growth between 1971 and 2011. It grew by 166 per cent. On the other hand, Kerala, which has a 25 per cent Muslim population, saw its population grow by 56.48 per cent during the same period. If PM Modi claims that our society cannot reward people and communities that have multiple children when it comes to resource allocation issues, this argument applies more to disparity between South and the North than to the Hindu vs Muslim divide.

Is Modi arguing that the Finance Commission’s allocation ratios will henceforth favour South India explicitly over the states in Indo-Gangetic plains? Because if he is, his own government’s insistence on using the 2011 Census instead of the 1971 data—as has been the norm this far—is contradicting his rhetoric. The delimitation exercise, perhaps the most important political question facing India, hinges on this very calculus. Is the Prime Minister arguing for the southern states and against the more populous northern states, given his fertility rate rhetoric? It is confusing, and a debate would have provided much-needed clarity on it. The Opposition politician could tie the incumbent here with his own logic. That would make for fun television.

More crucially, Modi’s rhetoric on population growth implies a call for decentralised policymaking. More populous states, by virtue of being poorer, need one set of policies, while the more prosperous ones with controlled populations need another. If, as the Prime Minister claims, those who have more children should not hold others hostage, then Kerala should be able to implement policies it needs, which are often diametrically opposite to the needs of states such as Rajasthan or Bihar.

All governments at the Centre, and particularly the incumbent one, have been about centralising policymaking. Will Modi undo the ‘One Nation, One Policy’ paradigm that his government championed? Will the Opposition offer decentralisation? Both the Opposition and the ruling party are silent on this issue and have been guilty of usurping states’ powers in the past. 

Such takeover of policymaking that belongs to state governments stems from the power of the purse that the Union government enjoys. To the Opposition’s credit, they have made the first attempt to curb this power by limiting cess—a route that the central government has used in the recent past to collect taxes by another name and keep the revenue without sharing it with states. Strangely, there has been no debate on this crucial piece of proposed reform in Centre-state relations. Perhaps we will learn what the politicians think when forced to answer questions on live television in each other’s presence.

Challenging Opposition’s biases

A skilled political opponent, like Bill Clinton famously did with George HW Bush in a US presidential debate in 1992, may bring up pocketbook issues and tie the growth in joblessness to the incumbent’s policies. The demographic dividend that India was slated to enjoy is slowly turning into a nightmare with lack of quality jobs. This demands moving India’s masses from the unproductive agricultural sector to manufacturing.

The Prime Minister may well argue that he brought in the Indian agriculture acts of 2020 or the three farm laws to address this. But is he willing to risk political capital in that pursuit? It failed once; is he willing to risk his reputation a second time? A debate is necessary not only to make the central government face reality but also to put the Opposition on the mat in terms of their biases. If the Opposition does not want agricultural reform in the way the farm laws envisioned, what’s their plan?

On foreign policy, the Modi government seems to have dumped the Nehruvian idea of principled non-alignment in favour of pragmatic utilitarianism. Reasonable people can differ in good faith over this. But there has not been any rational case made to the electorate. Are we now an amoral country that aligns itself purely on utilitarian concerns when it comes to geopolitics?

Debate is political theatre. Politicians are skilled at grandstanding and not actually answering questions. So, we may not find meaningful answers to any of these questions even if we have a debate. But given we live in a world shaped by American pop culture, we might as well adopt its rituals, especially when the ritual, in its purest form, is a way to hold power to account. If we don’t get serious answers, it may at least make for compelling TV. 

Nilakantan RS is a data scientist and the author of South vs North: India’s Great Divide. He tweets @puram_politics. Views are personal.

(Edited by Ratan Priya)