It is curious how Narendra Modi has gone from the mantra of “empowerment, not entitlement” to putting free cash into the bank accounts of small farmers. The election eve populism amounts to conceding what his government otherwise denies: the Indian economy hasn’t brought Achhe Din to the people of India. Be it rural wages or crop prices, job creation or new investments, all of it has been bad, never mind the fudged or hidden data.
The government has reached this nadir thanks to the prime minister’s shallow understanding of political narrative.
Politics over policy
When Narendra Modi took over as prime minister in 2014, he had before him the onerous task of re-booting the Indian economy that had been suffering from UPA-2’s policy paralysis.
The first thing Modi should have done was to take head-on the problem of ballooning bank NPAs. Raghuram Rajan’s noises on this front went unheeded. If the crisis of non-performing assets (NPAs) was allowed to become any bigger, it would hurt bank credit and thus new investments and thereby growth.
Modi thought he could just kickstart investment by screaming ‘Make in India’. Narendra Modi thinks ideas in India suffer because they aren’t sold well. He must be the world’s first leader to think he can make people buy a new tax, GST, as a great thing.
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Early in his regime, Narendra Modi wanted to make land acquisition easier by amending the law. Fresh from an eight-week holiday, Rahul Gandhi called the Modi government ‘suit-boot ki sarkar’. Modi was so rattled by that phrase that he altogether buried the idea of amending the law, after having promulgated an ordinance to the effect.
Last year, non-repayment of debt by Infrastructure Leasing &Financial Services triggered panic in the Indian economy. Rs 90,000 crores were at risk. IL&FS going bust could mean yet more NPAs. At the centre of the IL&FS crisis was the 2013 land acquisition law that made many projects unviable.
Winning election doesn’t make you an economist
Modi should have spent some of his enormous political capital on amending the land acquisition law. This would have meant letting Rahul Gandhi have a short-term political victory. But those projects would have taken off. We would have seen more investments flow, more jobs created, incomes rise. In other words, Achhe Din. Ditto if he had listened to Raghuram Rajan and acted decisively on cleaning up the banks in 2015.
Modi didn’t feel he needed to make such tough decisions, spend his political capital on what the men in suits wanted him to do. The term ‘suit-boot ki sarkar’ seemed such a political threat that Modi was plotting ways to become the messiah of the poor.
If Modi could win elections without taking the tough decisions the economy needed, why would he listen to economists? As he famously put it, it was a contest between ‘Harvard’ and ‘hard work’.
Modi launched one scheme after another in the typical Congress way but with better branding. Cleaning up the banks or amending the land acquisition act wouldn’t have given him an opportunity to make a sudden, grandiose address to the nation. Such an opportunity came through demonetisation.
Long-term success comes on the back of arduous work, patiently planting seeds and waiting for fruition. But Modi the politician has no patience.
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Narrative is what Narrative does
In Modiworld, Narrative is everything. All it takes to stay on top is the right narrative. And so, he has the right spin, the catchy acronyms, the best binaries. He knows how to drill an idea into your head.
Modi’s mistake is to think ‘narrative’ is about words. It is not. Narrative is about action.
The reason why ‘narrative’ has become an annoying cliché is that people think it’s all about giving a good spin, using the right words. Killed by over-use, ‘narrative’ is now called storytelling. The narrative-wallahs don’t understand that good story-telling cannot make a bad story look good.
In 2014, Modi had based his development narrative on the claim that he had already developed Gujarat. Look, his supporters said, the Tata Nano plant eventually found a place in Gujarat, the state where things get done.
Telling a story well can make it reach far and wide. But it has to be a good story in the first place. Narrative is not what Narrative says. Narrative is what Narrative does.
Pain is pain
Modi and his supporters think narrative wars are won by manipulating social media, bombarding the public with WhatsApp propaganda, bullying and buying over mainstream media, discrediting liberals, calling the opposition names, fudging the data, photoshopping images, increasing the video speed of a running train by 2x.
In truth, narrative wars are won by doing the unsexy things that don’t make for great instant headlines and shareable images. Narrative wars are won with real and not fudged economic growth rates, which create real and not fictional jobs. If Modi had actually saved Rs 3-4 lakh crores in demonetisation (as he had hoped), that would have been a narrative victory.
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When DeMo began to fail, we were told it wasn’t about killing black money but promoting cashless transactions. When cash was back, we were told DeMo’s objective was to increase the tax base. Many spin cycles later, there comes a point when the bullshit cuts through the good storytelling and the story make sense no more.
You may fudge the data but pain is pain. You may hide unemployment figures but that brings no solace to those who can’t find jobs. You may say there is no farm crisis but when you announce cash doles for farmers, but your filmi one-liners can’t explain the contradiction. You may game the ‘ease of doing business’ rankings but that won’t prevent IL&FS going down. You may fudge GDP figures but everyone can feel economic activity like the weather.