This election season, Narendra Modi is going beyond Kautilya to make allies toe the line

All the allies have caved in, which is why we saw them sitting beside Narendra Modi as he filed his nomination in Varanasi.

Supporters of PM Narendra Modi wear his masks, Mumbai | Photo: Dhiraj Singh | Bloomberg

Along with Kautilya’s four methods of extracting both submission and allegiance – saam, daam, dand, bhed, or advice, bribery, punishment and exploitation – Prime Minister Narendra Modi has imposed a fifth on his allies. This is the asana of sitting in a meditative posture and stilling the mind, until the storm passes.

Here’s an example. Modi has cracked the whip and ensured that his somewhat troublesome ally in Bihar, Janata Dal (United)’s Nitish Kumar, has so completely stilled his mind that he has refused to release his own party’s manifesto, for the first time since 2003.

That’s because Nitish’s party believes that Article 370, which gives Jammu & Kashmir a special status in the Indian Union, the uniform civil code as well as the building of a Ram Mandir at the disputed site in Ayodhya are ‘violative’ of the secular tenets of Indian democracy. But the ‘Nischay Patra’, or manifesto, is still hanging in mid-air – a bit like the mythological figure Trishanku, in this age of mythological allusions – because PM Modi and BJP don’t like the fact that a key ally is articulating these things.

So, the manifesto has remained unlaunched but is available for anyone who wants to read it.

The Janata Dal (United) or JD(U) has given in – gamely, some would say – because it sees advantage in the BJP vote being transferred on the ground in its favour. The JD(U) feels it is abiding by its secular principles, which in this case amounts to sitting on the fence, but the fact is that Modi has ensured that Nitish’s favourite yoga pose these days is the ‘shava asana’. Lying down, until the storm passes.

All the other allies, whether the Shiromani Akali Dal or the Shiv Sena, caved in a long time ago, which is why you saw them all sitting beside Modi ji as he filed his nomination in Varanasi last week. It’s another matter that nobody was smiling.

Interestingly, Modi has ensured the autonomous Election Commission behaves the same way. The credibility of the institution is at stake, with its refusal to take stock of complaints as old as one month. These include the PM asking for votes in the name of the soldiers killed in Pulwama (Latur, 9 April) and criticising the opposition for its position on Sabarimala (Tamil Nadu, 13 April).

With 373 constituencies out of 543 having voted already, but three crucial phases still left with 170 seats, former CEC T.N. Seshan’s cracking the whip comes to mind (“do you think I should allow politicians to commit dacoity on democracy?” was one well-known comment). If Seshan was around at Nirvachan Sadan today, at least the expenditure of the PM’s roadshow in Varanasi last week would have certainly earned his ire.

Remember that there is no limit to what political parties can spend, but there is a Rs 70 lakh limit on the expenditure by a candidate. The saffron razzmatazz in Varanasi would have far exceeded that, by any estimate. But the EC has kept very quiet.

Certainly, Modi doesn’t seem to care. His comments Monday in Sreerampur in Bengal that 40 Trinamool Congress MPs are ‘in touch’ with him has provoked the TMC into readying a complaint against him in the EC. The Congress is also moving the Supreme Court to request the EC to take cognizance of its complaints against Modi before the election ends.

Modi is banking on the fact that it’s all too little, too late. He has said what he has to say and anyway only 170 seats are left. Even if the EC takes cognizance, it will first issue him a show cause notice, wait at least 24 hours for him to respond and then take action. Too many ifs and buts.

Meanwhile, the Modi juggernaut rolls on. The country has seen this movie before, when India was Indira and Indira was India and it didn’t end too well.

But Modi certainly isn’t making the same mistakes again. Chanakya already said that ‘saam, daam, dand, bhed’ are the four attributes to make a nation fall in line. Adding the ‘shava asana’ to Kautilya’s lexicon is a wily addition on the part of India’s most ambitious leader today.