Why a discredited US politician is source of inspiration for Mr Jaitley, writes Shashi Tharoor

Finance minister Arun Jaitley | Praveen Jain/ThePrint

American politician Spiro T. Agnew, whom Arun Jaitley quotes in a recent blog, is hardly a role model.

It is curious – and instructive – that in his recent blog post from the United States, where he has gone for medical treatment, Arun Jaitley, the finance minister that time – may he get well soon! – chose to quote the discredited American politician Spiro T. Agnew in support of his attack on ‘the nattering nabobs of negativism’.

Agnew is hardly a role model for Mr Jaitley; he remains the only person forced to resign as Vice-President of the US on tax evasion charges, for which he was subsequently convicted. But his penchant for pithy one-liners, marked by ingenious alliteration, clearly appeals to Jaitley, who quotes him with relish on the Opposition being the “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history”.

There’s even more that Jaitley could have mined. Let me save him the trouble: Mr Jaitley might also borrow from Agnew his denunciation of his government’s opponents as ‘an effete corps of impudent snobs’, ‘ideological eunuchs,’ ‘professional anarchists,’ and (so appropriate given the imminent demise of the Modi government) ‘vultures who sit in trees’. When you are stealing from a thief, dear Arun-ji, why stop at two one-liners when you have a dozen?

Personally, as a critic of the government Mr Jaitley so irascibly defends, I am reassured by his source of inspiration. Like Agnew, who rashly dismissed criticism of his administration as the views of ‘this little group of men’ who ‘live and work in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, D.C., or New York City’, who ‘do not represent the views of America’, Jaitley and his party argue that their Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his supporters represent the true India and their opponents are an out-of-touch bunch of feckless dynasts. Or in Agnew’s own words, ‘a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government’.

Mr Jaitley chose his inspiration well, because there is much in this government’s thinking that has far more in common with Spiro T. Agnew than with Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln. The idea that the government is truly patriotic and its critics are really anti-national is, of course, deeply ingrained in Mr Jaitley’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its way of thinking. The Modi government’s assumption that the authorities need to come down with a heavy hand on ‘seditious’ JNU students, ‘Maoist’ university professors and ‘terrorist-sympathising’ human rights activists is merely an echo of what Agnew wanted done to protesters against the Vietnam War in his time. “Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman’s truncheon over the anarchist’s bomb,” Agnew said. Mr Jaitley could pass the analogy on to his lawyers prosecuting the JNU Five.

Of course, like Jaitley, Agnew had a political agenda to fulfil, and unlike Jaitley, he knew his words would be greeted with derision. As one commentator put it, referring to the Agnew lines that Jaitley quoted: “Agnew knew the scribes would write about it, if only to mock him. That was good: Let the elites mock patriotism!”

But one difference between Agnew’s America and Modi’s India is that the former was railing against the media, whereas the latter has brought it to heel. “The American people should be made aware of the trend toward monopolization of the great public information vehicles,” Agnew said bitterly, “and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands.”

That media power was critical of Agnew’s administration and the President he served, Richard Nixon; in India, it’s the diffusion of media outlets, thanks to the Internet, that saves public opinion from being monopolised by owners and editors of the mainstream media who are more easily curbed by Mr Modi and his minions. Mr Modi, the one Prime Minister who has never held a press conference in India, would welcome it if he had fewer media outlets to deal with and fewer proprietors to cajole or cudgel into submission.

Which is why there are still outlets for the negativism that Mr Jaitley rails against. Why are the majority of the Indian people negative today? The BJP’s political and ideological allies openly deliver speeches that border on hate speech, divide us into ‘Ramzade and haramzade’, advocate ideas like mass conversions and attack on beef-eaters, and ask the PM’s critics to go to Pakistan (why Pakistan? If you want to send your critics far away, why not suggest Canada?)

But the government does not lift a finger. On the contrary, under the BJP, dissent is portrayed as seditious, protests are ‘anti-national’ and free speech is censored through economic pressure on media owners and outright political intimidation—all of which are illustrations of the petty intolerance and bigotry that passes for a ruling ideology in today’s times. Pratap Bhanu Mehta has described Modi’s new India as a ‘republic of fear’. If anything, theirs is a new India that we must stand up to and resist at all costs. That is a positive agenda, not a negative one.

And lest Mr Jaitley forget, nearly five years of economic mismanagement have witnessed a fall in the GDP growth rate and successive disruptive economic policies that have hit our country, notably the demonetisation disaster and the wrecking of a great idea through the inept implementation of the GST. Manufacturing has contracted, exports have declined, growth in industrial production has slowed, and agriculture is stagnating (or worse, given the annual rise in the number of farmer suicides). Credit growth stood at 5.1 per cent in 2016-17, the lowest in over 60 years. Unemployment and job losses are rife. After declaring ‘no more tax terrorism’, the Modi government inflicted tax demands on entire new categories of victims, shaking investor confidence. There is no sign of achhe din.

As Jaitley does his best from his hospital bed to put lipstick on a pig, asserting in the face of a fusillade of unanswerable questions that the Rafale scam is actually no scam at all, let me recommend another line from the man he loves to quote, Spiro T. Agnew, when he was forced to resign. “I apologize for lying to you,” Agnew told the nation. “I promise I won’t deceive you except in matters of this sort.” But such a statement may be more than we can expect from our Pecksniffian Prime Minister and the mindless minions of mendacity that surround him.

(Agnew didn’t say that—I did.)