Thank you dear subscribers, we are overwhelmed with your response.
Your Turn is a unique section from ThePrint featuring points of view from its subscribers. If you are a subscriber, have a point of view, please send it to us. If not, do subscribe here: https://theprint.in/
I’ll admit to perverse pleasure when I see foreign pundits and many of our own Westernized elite bemoaning PM Modi’s immense popularity and his alleged authoritarianism (see, for example, Nicholas Kristof’s recent overwrought piece “He’s the World’s Most Popular Leader. Beware.” in the New York Times).
I suppose I’m a member of the Indian elite myself having gone to an English-medium high school in Kolkata and later to the US for a Ph.D. Nevertheless, I’ll happily stick my neck above the parapet to say: we could use more authoritarianism and less Tower of Babel. A poor country with a population of nearly one and a half billion can scarcely afford years of one party chasing out the last from power. We need stability, infrastructure development, a business-friendly environment and a sense of pride in being Indian. Modi has delivered on all these counts.
Personally, I love the fact that the economic landscape now is awash with startups and a plethora of unicorns vie for billions in capital. What a change from when I was growing up in Kolkata in the 70s and 80s when the dream of every middle-class Bengali mom and dad was for their child to find a “sarkari chakri” (government job – nationalized banks were the top of the heap) and “babshadars” (business people) were sneered at as shady. I remember a prospective groom of a classmate being nixed by her parents for making a living “selling stuff”. They ended up eloping, which caused her parents to angrily break off all contact, until he became rich selling stuff, upon which relations were promptly restored.
It’s well-known that Modi looks to Singapore as his political inspiration (he is a great admirer of the late and long-serving PM of that island state, Lee Kuan Yew, who was as authoritarian as he was successful) and South Korea as his economic ideal. This explains the way he operates: stoking a personality cult so that people trust him and a reliance on a few Indian “chaebols” – see Tata,, Ambani, Adani, et al – to lead the way on the industrial front.
Does any serious observer believe that China could have become the economic and geopolitical behemoth that it has in the space of three decades, lifting half a billion citizens from poverty into the middle class in the process, if it had been a multiparty democracy? I do not mean to decry democracy. It conveys legitimacy and acceptability to leadership that comes to power winning a popular election. But one should not be bedazzled by the process itself. It is but a means to a far more important end, that being the upliftment of the people who voted. Which entails, once in a position of needing to actually get things done, leaders having to muffle their ears occasionally to antagonistic voices. If this be called authoritarianism, so be it. And, ironically enough, it may be the way to succeed in a democracy. For the Modi of today, call him whatever name you want, is no different from the Modi who ran the country starting 2014. And won again in a landslide in 2019.
Modi plans to entrench himself as a dictator cry his detractors. The reply to that is to not “misunderestimate” the Indian electorate. In 1977, an era when villages, where the bulk of our population lives, often had a couple of radios and a bamboo board plastered with the daily paper each as news source, Indira Gandhi of Emergency infamy was ousted in a general election. We, the Indian people, are not easily fooled.
Sure, the BJP plays identity politics (read Hindutva). There is no evidence, however, that this is a governing strategy. It is to win elections. And thank the Lord (ok, Krishna or Ram or whoever) they keep doing so.
Finally, not that it matters much to us, I would point out to Western pundits, who like to lecture us on our alleged failings as a democracy, the spectacle of law enforcement, media and even parts of the judiciary in their “shining city on a hill” desperately and patently illegally colluding to to keep a populist leader from participating in elections to become President again. Surely this is not the way of a vibrant democracy.
Also read: SubscriberWrites: Citizens must have access to more ways of influencing what happens in parliament
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.
COMMENTS