Time to lower the political temperature

It is time for the Modi government to acknowledge the new reality of the Lok Sabha and adopt a give- and-take approach to governance

The general elections are behind us, and a minority government styled as Modi 3.0 has taken office. A reinvigorated Opposition has already seen the presentation of the Union Budget, which has picked ideas from the Congress manifesto, like the apprenticeship programme to address the burning crisis of jobs for the millions. This should be a good sign in democratic politics. Good ideas can come from everywhere. The government could give credit to the Congress and earn some goodwill from the party in return.

This is a time for the Narendra Modi government to recognise and respect the new reality of the current Lok Sabha, and to understand that long-term success in politics and complex issues of governance demands the approach of give and take. The first pre-requisite for this is to lower the political temperature to get some real work done. Instead, the government has contributed to raising the political temperature even more. All indications are that the bitterness of the election season isn’t going away.

The government’s decision to declare June 25 as ‘Samvidhaan Hatya Diwas’, which is a clear attack targeting the Congress on the Emergency, the Union Home Minister’s latest political attacks on Shiv Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray and Nationalist Congress Party’s Sharad Pawar, and the personal appearance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the wedding of Mukesh Ambani’s son when rising wealth and income inequality have been brought into sharp focus, indicate that its ‘business as usual’ for the Modi sarkar. To that extent, it mocks the nation and the people who did not give it a clear mandate for the third term. The government’s answer is to keep the pot boiling as it lives a Rip Van Winkle story — almost as if it slept through the election results, and now wants to live an old reality in a new world. 

Indeed, accommodation and conciliation should have been the approach even with a brute majority, like the one it had in its previous term. But that brought hubris, and it is the hubris in large part that brought the political defeat. No lessons have been learned. Indeed, they cannot be, because learnability does not go with a self-righteousness that digs in and a greed that wants to grab it all, be it votes, attention or narratives. This is a command-and-control mind at work; national issues are pictured as war and everything is fair because the leader must win at all costs.

In many ways, the story is a reflection of the internal emptiness of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has not been able to fix accountability for its showing in the Lok Sabha, and has been rendered incapable of reflection or raising hard questions for itself. Modi’s vice-like grip on the party is at one level a political victory for him, because every leader likes a party that does not question its leadership.

There are some internal noises emerging: an important group has raised questions on the working of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, and for the electoral losses in that state; the RSS chief has yet again offered remarks not seen as favourable to Modi. All these are oblique signs of an internal unease. Direct questions and downright analysis are missing in the BJP. For all the accusations of the Congress being a family-run party, the BJP has only followed the path it seeks to condemn, becoming in little time the preserve of the vagaries of the Modi-Shah thinking. This capture tells us a lot about the party and its fibre, more than any history-telling can.

It is not difficult to see that the duo has survived by constantly distracting attention. This has inevitably brought us an unending game of bogey-hunting. Consider the latest example of just how much the break and bitterness is with the Opposition on the simple issue of a NITI Aayog meeting, chaired by Modi last week. Its governing council is ‘the premier body tasked with evolving a shared vision of national priorities and strategies, with the active involvement of States’. This is one place where the government could and should have worked hard so that all the chief ministers were respectfully accommodated. 

Instead, 10 chief ministers did not attend. The only Opposition voice present, Mamata Banerjee, walked out and complained that her mic was muted, and she felt insulted. The arrogance in the later remarks of the NITI Aayog CEO B V R Subrahmanyam speaks for itself: “For those who did not participate, I always say that it is their loss.” Where do these ideas come from? The slanging match on why she walked out and if the mic was muted is an example of how lower-order conversations are fuelled and relished. It is for the government at the Centre to stop this slide, to build confidence, and to earn some credibility with the Opposition, who are as much representatives of the people.

The open fissures that the Union Budget has caused are troubling. It saw an NDA ally like Nitish Kumar skip the NITI Aayog meeting, reportedly on Bihar not being given the special status recognition it asked. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin has issued a strong statement on the injustice meted out to his state in the Union Budget, stating that the BJP wants revenge against all those states that voted out the BJP, and TN in particular. The government, now overly dependent on two allies, is incapable of carrying everybody along, probably even the allies themselves.

Where do we go from here?

Soon after the elections, one view was that the BJP appropriately cut to size by the electorate would be now forced to listen and be mindful of boundaries. That has not happened. The other view may hold; which is that a diminished BJP at the Centre, unable to handle criticism and unskilled in charting the middle path, may end up doing more harm to the nation and its democratic traditions. 

(The writer is a journalist and faculty member at SPJIMR)

(Syndicate: The Billion Press)