In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, voters are unenthused, or as they say in North India–“thanda”. The weather is too hot. And the election season is far too long. Mainstream media is drumming up an artificial orchestra, but across cities and villages, the dominant mood is weariness and indifference.
No wonder the Election Mantri-sorry-Pradhan Mantri, Narendra Modi, has decided that the only way to galvanise an apathetic electorate–which is no longer chanting “abki baar char sau paar” or “ghar ghar Modi”–is to unleash the weapons of mass distraction.
In strident tones, he’s playing the politics of fear. One day he announces that the Congress manifesto is like the Muslim League. The next day he plays doomsayer and declares that the Congress will snatch away women’s mangalsutras. And the third day, he warns that Congress will redistribute everyone’s wealth to Muslims.
Yet, a government that has been in power for 10 years is astoundingly quiet on its own record. It refuses to talk about what it has done in the last decade.
Ordinarily, after being in power for so long, the Lok Sabha elections should be a referendum on Modi’s performance as the Prime Minister, and the hits and misses of his government. But so far, the Election Mantri-sorry-Pradhan Mantri is only hyping the failures of past Congress governments. Modi simply will not tell us about his government’s achievements or the lack of it.
So, perhaps it is up to me to do so.
Demonetisation, China, deaths
First, demonetisation, the Modi government’s flagship announcement. On 8 November 2016, at 8 pm, Modi appeared on TV screens to suddenly announce that all Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes would become illegal at midnight. In the span of four hours, 86 per cent of the currency in circulation became worthless. The aim was to fight black money, but chaos, despair and tragedies ensued.
Long queues formed outside banks. Scores of small enterprises had to shut down because they had no money to pay workers. According to the economist Arun Kumar, growth for the year went down by one full percentage point.
And guess what? Illegal money is back in the market. The Income Tax department is continuing to conduct raids to recover notes. In 2023, the IT department said it had recovered Rs 150 crore in cash after it raided business groups in New Delhi and Haryana. Raids on chit funds and silk saree traders in Tamil Nadu yielded Rs 250 crore in cash. In short, demonetisation was a failure.
Millions lost jobs and incomes for nothing. If demonetisation is one of the Modi government’s spectacular achievements, why does it not celebrate 8 November as ‘Notebandi’ Day? Instead, Modi celebrates 14 August as “Partition Horrors Remembrance Day”.
The Modi government was caught napping during Covid-19. We still don’t have accurate numbers on how many lives were lost. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that there were about 4.7 million Covid-linked deaths between 2020 and 2021 in India, or about 10 times the official figures put out by the central government.
Medical journal The Lancet said that India’s fatalities during the pandemic have been undercounted and are six to eight times higher than the official figure. The Modi government furiously denounced WHO but refused to tell citizens what the death figures are and by what methodology mortality figures had been calculated.
As the pandemic began to spread, a Parliament session was held in March 2020. The same month, the Congress’ Kamal Nath government in Madhya Pradesh was toppled. Suddenly, on the fateful day of 24 March 2020, Modi appeared on TV to announce a total lockdown of India’s 1.3 billion people with just four hours’ notice. All transport services were cruelly shut down. Hundreds and thousands of desperate migrant workers took to the streets to walk to their distant homes. Many died on the way.
In May 2021, while Covid-19 death toll and infections were still rising, the government allowed the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar. Hindi language newspaper, Dainik Bhaskar, published harrowing photos of innumerable burning dead bodies beside the Ganga, and floating in the river. Several offices of the newspaper were raided by the IT department on 22 July.
Modi has not yet presented a report card to citizens on what his government has done to deal with the triple whammy of demonetisation, a hastily imposed and confusing Goods and Services Tax (GST) and losses faced during Covid-19 and the lockdown.
Indian citizens are also not being properly informed on the border stand-off with China. Modi’s ‘jhoola diplomacy’ with Chinese President Xi Jinping has obviously gone horribly wrong. In 2014, Modi posed with Xi on a Gujarati style jhoola (swing) on the Sabarmati waterfront.
By 2023, China had occupied 2,000 square kilometers of Indian territory. So far, 21 rounds of negotiations have been held between Indian and Chinese military officials.
After the Galwan Valley clashes between Indian and Chinese soldiers on 15 June 2020, which killed 20 Indian personnel, Modi said: “Na koi hamari seema mein ghus aaya hai, na hi koi ghusa hua hai, na hi hamari koi post kisi dusre ke kabze mein hain.” (No one has entered India, and none of our posts have fallen into anyone else’s possession).
But if there is no territorial dispute between India and China, then why are so many rounds of negotiations taking place? What went wrong with the Chinese? Modi won’t tell us. In fact, Modi dares not mention the country by name.
Modi has not even told us why India’s relations with Pakistan suddenly deteriorated so badly. In December 2015, the Prime Minister abruptly landed in Pakistan. He then hugged former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and walked hand in hand. Modi also visited Sharif at his palatial Lahore home. If Pakistan had not provided India with firm assurances on cross-border terror attacks, why did Modi attend Sharif’s granddaughter’s wedding? A year later in 2016, terrorists struck Uri and India was back to calling Pakistan a “terrorist State”.
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Spinning a new dream
Modi recently claimed that “timely intervention by the Centre saved Manipur”. Really? Civil war has raged in Manipur for a year. Over 200 people have died in the ethnic violence and over 70,000 are displaced. Why has the Prime Minister not visited the relief camps even once? Why did the Opposition have to threaten a no-confidence motion for the Centre to allow a parliamentary debate on Manipur? Why did it take a ghastly video of women being paraded naked in Manipur for the Centre to break its silence? To talk of how the Centre has “saved” Manipur is pure mendacity.
The Modi government promised to double farmers’ incomes by 2022, but massive protests of 2020-2021 show that this has not happened. The government launched the Smart Cities Mission in 2015, and by December 2023, only the Madurai project was complete.
In Goa’s Panjim, which is a proposed Smart City, all you see are dug up roads and cranes. The Centre has failed to meet the 2023 deadlines for 400 projects worth Rs 22,814 crore.
Today, India holds 134th rank in the Human Development Index and 111th in the Global Hunger Index. Merely 10 per cent people in India hold 70 per cent of the country’s wealth. The current income inequality in India is worse than it was during the British Raj, according to a recent study by the The World Inequality Lab, titled Income and Wealth Inequality in India: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj.
About 42 per cent of graduates under 25 years of age are unemployed in the country. Indians make up the third largest cohort of illegal migrants in the US. Children in eighth grade struggle to read second grade texts in schools. More than 30 per cent of kids still suffer from stunting due to malnourishment.
Moreover, the Centre has amassed a shocking Rs 100 lakh crore of debt, two times more than the total of 14 previous governments. The Modi government is pushing India into a debt trap.
Modi will not tell citizens about any of these things. Instead, he will keep spinning a new dream. “Achche din” (good days) were supposed to start in 2014 but it didn’t. “New India” was supposed to dawn in 2019, but that didn’t work either. Now, we’re told to look forward to 2047 and hope for “Amrit Kaal”. To offset anti-incumbency, Modi peddles a new dream every election year.
The Election Mantri-sorry-Pradhan Mantri detests engaging with reality. He prefers Bollywood imagery, a bubble of delusion, and a decorated photo op in sanitised surroundings. Modi loves to prance in a make-believe world in which he scuba dives, meditates in caves, takes elephant safaris and performs underwater yoga–a multi-media pantomime designed to lull and hypnotise. That’s why during elections, an escapist Modi needs mangalsutras and Muslims and Opposition-will-take-your-money rants to distract voters. Because the truth is that mangalsutras are not being snatched away, jobs, livelihoods and incomes are.
The writer is a Rajya Sabha MP, All India Trinamool Congress. She tweets @sagarikaghose. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)