Collapse All Over

10 August 2020

I was not surprised to see NDTV tweet : “PM Modi sends Rs 17,100 crore into bank accounts of over 8 crore farmers.” Actually it is the kind of narrative that has become passé especially when you see how Mr Rahul Kanwal underwent convulsions at Mr Pawan Khera’s suggestion that the media manipulation of narrative was the reason that Indians voted so overwhelmingly for Mr Modi in the Mood of the Nation Polls held/discussed by the TV Studios. By the way, Mr Kanwal did have a valid point, which is this- has the Indian voter become so swayed or persuaded that normal economic indicators and performance parameters are irrelevant to him?

In a country where the economic news has been uniformly bad over the last six years, much of it self inflicted and some of it due to international events, why have Indians not come out on to the streets and protested for perceived wrongs of the day, including petrol prices and ordinance to change farm produce procurement through APMC, not to mention the massive defence event of the border setback in Eastern Ladakh where even the most ardent supporter of the government now agrees that Chinese are present! Let us not even go for any analyses of the Corona Pandemic where each day India is setting new records in cases and slowly the deaths too attributed to Corona now seem to be catching up. Actually the orchestration of news is such that despite the many agitations on the streets which one can see on Facebook channels of the INC, CPM and YouTube channels now mushrooming by independent media persons, you can glimpse that there is ferment, there is worry, there is debate and there is discussion, only it is not mainstream. How many of India’s economy savvy readers, viewers and commentators took note for example that Mr Rathin Roy Director of National Institute of Public Finance and Policy wrote a column that began with the words, “ This is the last column…” and titled his piece as “It is not too late, but it soon will be” in Business Standard on 7 August 2020?https://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/it-is-not-too-late-but-it-soon-will-be-120080700063_1.html

Then we see an pseudonymous handle @sonaliranade https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1292415334633201664.htmladdressed to Mr Shekhar Gupta, Ms Burkha Dutt and Ms Sucheta Dalal compose a thread in which she said that she had crossed the line to support Mr Rahul Gandhi, because, she could now envisage the grave danger that India was now in and how her understanding of Media as a conceptual container made her feel that she needed to challenge these people to come out and proclaim that she is not wrong, else she has promised to withdraw from social media fully. She was once amongst many Indians who thought that Dr Manmohan Singh had done all the hard work and now the macroeconomic arc of India was on a trajectory of growth, and assumed what I caricature as ‘any ‘monkey at the wheel’ could drive us to La La Land of prosperity’!

So first we had late Mr Jaitley the venerated media wonk and Master of Spin fielding economic matters and now Ms Nirmala Sitaraman, his protege no less, adept in righteous looking spin to boot, who have taken us to that area where India’s numbers are not trust worthy and now increasingly not credit worthy! What folk do not understand is how Mr Modi’s agenda or economic steering is not handled by North Block, much like the rest of policy, it is remotely handled from Nagpur. Nagpur operates on its network of grass roots workers, all of whom actually are well integrated as community elders across India and who command much respect for decades as being self less and disciplined, like a version of Mr Anna Hazare, only they are more known by their Khakis! If you now look back at Rafale Announcement by Mr Modi in France in 2015, Demonetisation Announcement in Delhi in 2016, you get a clear idea of that control. Unless you still want to pull wool over your eyes or noise cancelling over your ears, or stuck in a warp of Modi-Land, you will understand how Mr Modi himself has not much of a say in how India is run. His role is to be the face and the voice of the RSS apparatchik and he is doing what he must with the entire of zest and capacity at his disposal. If you watch Mr Modi, you find that doubt, where in Ayodhya for example, at the momentous occasion of laying the silver brick and founding the edifice that would go on to build what is billed as “The Home For Ram Lalla”, he made a specific context pitch, to move on from Jai Sri Ram to Jai Siya Ram. He was calling for a reset from the divisive communal vectoring of Indian polity through this kind of symbolism. Only if you can see how he has transcended from the pulpit of Red Fort of 2014 to Ayodhya of 2020, there is no hoary call for a communal moratorium, this was just a plaintive cry to the devout to transition.

The RSS reads the media well. It is capable of listening to groundswell too. So in a sense, the about turn of the RSS at the time of the emergency was because apart from the Hindi heartland which was in arms over ‘forced sterilisation’, the rest of India was actually celebrating the timely arrival of trains, the fear of duty that government servants depicted, and drop in corruption perceived by the public at the height of this Emergency! The Hindutva group was not in a quid pro quo when even Rajiv Gandhi was elected with a massive mandate, though institutional capture was very much on its agenda. If one sees how it has steered the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, you can see how it first floated a special purpose vehicle called VHP, then went on to pursue the matter judicially hardly lending any street level presence to calls for ‘Mandir Wahin Banayenge’ ( Temple will be made there only!) by Hindutva politicians now belonging to BJP and VHP, after it had effected the demolishing of the Babri Masjid.

If today the collapse of the media is at the focus of many citizens, back then it was the collapse of the judiciary. If one takes the Supreme Courts pronouncements on the Temple agitation, its conduct of judicial hearings right down to last year’s final verdict, you don’t need to be a student of law to understand that the Turkish SC judicial pronouncement reverting the Hagia Sophia from Museum to Mosque overturning the decision of modern Turkey’s founder Kemal Ataturk, is far more reasoned and judicious that any of the actions of India’s SChttps://theprint.in/opinion/if-supreme-court-of-india-decided-on-hagia-sophia/461178/. Remember that ‘belief’ was the arbiter for the SC’s pronouncement when Babri Masjid was a clear Wakf property enjoying provisioning from the Government from the British Era to now. But more importantly, the transgressing of the Masjid which was accepted by the SC as a ‘criminal act’ has not been prosecuted then, not now when the final award was made and not planned even for the foreseeable future. What the SC has done, what Indian judiciary has done is failed as Mr Owaisi eloquently pointed out to uphold India’s own Constitution, in the manner of a serial offender. Of course, politics can view these events as righting of historical wrongs, but can courts step outside the boundary of what is judicable and outside the four corners of the written law and judicial cannon? From the one day token punishment of Judicial custody to then CM of UP Mr Kalyan Singh, the SC ( which today has not intervened in the cases of Elgar Parishad, the Bhima Koregaon prosecutions, the detentions of people like Mr Navalakha, Mr Varahari Rao, and Ms Sudha Bharadwaj against the catena of its own judgements, which dragged the decision about bail to Mr Chidambaram and which has not showing any urgency over the PMC Bank crises, the Migrants crises, and so many matters which are now routinely done under ‘Sealed Cover’) has now traversed the full course to where we find Mr Ranjan Gogoi MP now!

I am loath to believing that Indians are not patriotic or fundamentally pernicious as many who oppose Mr Modi would like to believe. Rather I view Mr Modi as a leader who has been let down by the system. Had due diligence been done by officials, in Finance Ministry, by RBI, Mr Modi would not have agreed to make Mr Anil Ambani the lead local partner for the Rafale Deal. Today we have an embarrassment due to this failure. Had health experts not down played the Corona crises, had not epidemiologists and heads of medical institutions not joined the chorus that laughed at Mr Rahul Gandhi’s Cassandra moments, Mr Modi would have been able to better direct the Pandemic management in India. Who misled Mr Modi into thinking that thermal scans at Airports were enough for India to stop the Virus, and who misinformed him that India had set up watertight screening at all its influx points for international travel? Remember this recent controversy over the vaccine where Mr Modi it was rumoured was making the announcement on 15 August 2020 and how when experts weighed in the vaccine announcement has taken a back seat? Any leader is as good as the feedback, as good as the intelligence that is made available to him. Why blame Mr Modi for denying Chinese presence, https://indianjournalismreview.com/2020/08/07/narendra-modi-and-barbra-streisand-a-short-story-on-how-not-to-bury-a-secret-in-12-newspaper-screenshots/when ORF and many veterans themselves disputed the assertions by Colonel Ajai Shukla (retd) and Lt Gen Panag (retd) in their columns? Why blame Mr Modi if ‘Arthakranti’ group with support from Nagpur is creating all the basis for economic decision making, including the debacle of Demonetisation? We have Mr Viral Acharya https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/policy/why-does-the-reserve-bank-need-to-be-less-reserved-about-dissent-ask-viral-acharya/articleshow/77368682.cmsand Mr Urjit Patelhttps://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/former-rbi-governor-patel-pens-book-on-dealing-with-npa-issue/articleshow/76796929.cms?from=mdr, two RBI homegrown experts who chose to remain mum then but now have come out with their version of ‘cry after the milk is spilt’ memoirs after relinquishing office!

If you go on social media and follow RW and join the RW ecosystem, the IT Cell and the Indian TV Studios can leave you with a heady feel of ‘greatness’ of how India is poised for ‘greatness’ and the whole world is clamouring for Indian support and Indian presence. The collapse of alternative points of view is not as much a matter of concern as the utter disregard to truth that the media is indulging. The same media that made Anna Hazare close to a modern day Mahatma, even now does not accept whole heartedly that Rahul Gandhi has called it correct about the Triple Tsunami of Employment crises, Health Crises and Monetary Crises that he did in February 2020, and the further his pointed case for India to take a review of its China policy. Yes I did read a opinion piece in Telegraph and in Deccan Chronicle, but largely people dismiss his candour and his charisma as snow flakes and deride his calculated concerns. How did we get here? Not by default. By design. This collapse all over us, is something that has been in the making for long. Mr Modi is simple the mascot presiding over its denouement.

Once people who were true blood political animals would admire Mr Vajpayee as the right man in the wrong party. A few decades from now, Indians will admit that Mr Modi too was one such leader, perhaps the right leader for a wrong country… As the record of species and organisms shows, each is as good as its weakest link the strand of DNA or RNA that failed to hold fast, unravelling eons of meticulously crafted evolution and leading down the slippery slope of extinction! Semantics can make a case for the ‘worse- ness’- that things could have been lot worse, or things could get worse! But do remember as 15 August approaches our glorious ‘Tryst With Destiny’!