Modi is going the Nixon way with JNU crackdown

Contemplating the ham-handed response of the Modi government to the student protest at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), I was reminded of the shootings at Ohio's Kent State University in the spring of 1970. For the record, the Ohio National Guard fired Jallianwala-Bagh-style, 67 rounds in 13 seconds, at a crowd of student protesters, killing four and injuring many more. A few days preceding the horrific events of May 4, president Richard M Nixon authorised the invasion by US troops of Cambodia. The students were protesting this in particular but also the entire war in Indochina (Indochinese Peninsula).

A divisive figure, Nixon became a hate object on university campuses. The realisation dawned on me when a few years later, I enrolled in graduate journalism school some 130 miles south of Kent State and attended my first-ever rock concert. It featured Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, who brought down the house with their tour de force, Ohio, whose lyrics ran: "Tin soldiers and Nixon coming…four dead in Ohio."

Also read: Indian universities need dissent to stay alive

The campus killing followed revelations in 1969 of US military atrocities in My Lai, a South Vietnam village in which US soldiers massacred nearly 500 civilians including women and children. The horror story prompted a significant dip in public support for the war. Plus the reinstitution of the draft lottery that year disrupted suburban homes as youth were forcibly enlisted for a tour of military duty in Vietnam.

In retrospect, the May 1970 Kent State killings proved to be the turning point; they brought Middle America face to face with state-sanctioned violence. In the event, opposition to the war snowballed.

Nixon grew desperate and paranoid about the groundswell of hostility not just to the war but to him personally. He made a series of missteps including orchestrating a huge cover-up to obstruct investigations into the burglary at the Watergate complex headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington DC. Initially, however, Kent State and the previous government decisions seemed not to make much of a difference to Nixon's popularity; he went on to win a second term by a landslide in 1972.

Chuffed by his electoral victory, Nixon failed to read the signs of public revulsion spreading to the "silent majority" that he and his supporters frequently invoked as proof of electoral invincibility. Days into his second stint, Nixon had to confront incessant revelations about the Watergate scandal and then in the fall of 1973, he had to deal with a major international economic challenge: the OPEC oil embargo brought on by his administration's support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war with Syria and Egypt.

As his popularity plummeted, Nixon was threatened with impeachment by the US Congress. In August 1974, he resigned in disgrace.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems set on a similar course. It started in 2015 with revelations of the scandals surrounding Lalit Modi and the intervention with British authorities on his behalf by external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj; then came the controversy over the cricket impresario's links with Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje and the deadly Vyapam case involving Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan; the prime minister maintained a sphinx-like silence in the probable belief that once the headlines are past, people will forget about these scandals.

Also read: BJP's patriotism or 'anti-national', Modi wants you to choose

But the scandals seem continuously to unfold. The protests by students at Pune's Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) over the appointment of an RSS apparatchik as director continued from June through January. In the interim, there was the murder of a Muslim man in a UP village, Dadri, by a gang of right-wing thugs on the suspicion he possessed and ate beef. Then there was the brouhaha over the beef ban in Haryana. The campaign by Mr Modi and his lieutenant Amit Shah in Bihar also resulted in loss of public support and the subsequent reverse in the Assembly election.

In September last year, the Modi regime was rocked by reports that prominent literary personalities started to return awards to the Sahitya Akademi to protest the murder of a Karnataka scholar by Hindutva goons.

More recent is the controversy over the suicide by a Dalit doctoral student at Hyderabad University over the stoppage of his fellowship money and expulsion from the hostel along with five other Dalit students. It was widely seen as an affirmation of caste discrimination practiced by adherents of Hindutva, the rambunctious assertion of religious bigotry.

Almost immediately thereafter, the government became implicated inthe JNU imbroglio that resulted in the arrest of the president of the students union. It is spinning into a culture war, much like what happened in the US under Nixon. The BJP's goon squads running amok and the intemperate and confrontationist rhetoric of saffron politicians have created disquiet in middle-class and upwardly mobile India where education and careers are indispensable and essential cultural values.

Also read - JNU Crackdown: 4 powerful voices you can't ignore

By taking their stentorian pseudo-nationalist agenda to academic campuses, Modi's Hindu fundamentalists are scaring the parents and wards of students for whom good grades and concomitant good jobs are a holy grail. Such disruptions are hugely unwelcome in the lives of such people whose first and foremost goal in life is to see their children faring well in the groves of academe and later in the job market.

Finally in a striking denouement of the platform on which Modi swept to power in May 2014 comes the news that the Modi government has revived the $2 billion tax claim against Vodafone, the UK-based telecom firm. This is while the case is in international arbitration over the government's retrospective changes in tax laws.

With this impressive list of faux pas, Mr Modi's popularity may now have shrunk to the hard-core base of Hindutva true believers. In the past few days, his party has been rocked by high-profile resignations. The writing, as Nixon discovered 42 years before him, is on the wall.

(An edited version of this post will appear in Education World, February 2016.)

Arvind Kejriwal is clueless about reducing Delhi's pollution

Arvind Kejriwal is an inexplicable outcome of the rough-and-tumble of Delhi politics. Thrown up by popular disillusionment with the Indian National Congress and the BJP, Kejriwal and his ragtag band were once portrayed as the new vibe in politics.

Alas, that hope disappeared a few days into his first tilt at governance.

We are all familiar with his sanctimonious drama at the time and have now gotten used to his second-inning hypocrisy in which he has repudiated almost everything he claimed to stand for, including brothers-in-arms like Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan. Not that Yadav and Bhushan are any less sanctimonious.

The depressing thing about Kejriwal is not his dubious health but the seeming lack of intellectual rigour or administrative skills. Worse is his lack of gravitas. He inspires no confidence.

It is clear from his amateurish handling of the pollution issue that he consults just the deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia and, perhaps, a couple of others. The result: ad hoc responses that won't likely have any impact or will confound the situation.

Pollution is a major public health hazard and needs to be tackled in an organised, far-thinking manner. A joint response by central and state governments is the first step. Also, some amount of citizen involvement is critical - maybe only to smooth vehicular traffic and to curb the use of celebratory fireworks throughout the year; both are preventable sources of pollution.

Also read: Mr Kejriwal, tell me how will you implement #DelhiOddEven formula

Instead, Kejriwal is locked in mortal combat with the Modi government and its various agencies, especially the Delhi police and the Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung. His pronouncement restricting the use of cars was followed by introducing exemptions for women, government and emergency vehicles and also on the enforcement of the restrictions.

In the end, it got so muddled that no one really knows what's going on, especially the shrill television media, whose role in manufacturing a ratings-points crisis out of a serious public health issue, needs to be examined in depth.

Not just television news but print media too created all manner of confusion that left people stumped.

Worldwide, governments have successfully tackled pollution by first creating a legal framework for action. In the US, successive laws were introduced beginning the 1960s with amendments continuing well into the 1990s.

The Clean Air Act and its various iterations facilitated funding of research and enforcement mechanisms to deal with various components of pollution. Three decades in the making, anti-pollution laws were a systematic effort that included identification and categorisation of pollutants, setting up an independent monitoring and enforcement agency and then further refining and redefining measures to control pollution.

On each step of the way, federal, state and local governments and agencies worked in tandem, keeping citizens informed through a strong media outreach program combining education and advocacy.

As such, the US environmental protection and pollution control program has been a huge success.

More than any European country, the US experience is more relevant to India because of its federal structure, huge economy, large population, big cities and massive demand for energy and transportation.

(An edited version of this post will appear in DailyO.in, December 2015.)

Everything Modi sarkar is doing wrong by attacking dissent

The indefatigable campaigner came steadily unglued in Bihar, reverting to a nakedly bigoted message

Since he was named the Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate in September 2013, Narendra Modi ran a loud and aggressive campaign on two fronts: one, to run down the Indian National Congress as a corrupt force responsible for the lack of development; two, to sell a "happy days are here" story packaged with slogans and sound bites.

As such, he blanked out the Congress' impressive record of 10 years of eight per cent growth, painted a grim picture of the nation's economy and projected himself as the knight in shining armour, come to pull India out of the morass he conjured up in his invective-filled speeches. Using dog whistle communal messaging for his following of bigots while holding out the promise of strong leadership for others, he spoke persuasively of "achche din."

The strategy worked brilliantly. A year later, the BJP won a clear majority in the Lok Sabha and Modi was named prime minister.

Now, Modi finds that his majority in the lower house does not amount to much when faced with a determined and united opposition in the Rajya Sabha. The first-past-the-post system that gave his party a clear majority with just 31 per cent of the vote is not enough to sustain his fantasy of global power status he sold to credulous voters, leave alone a "Hindu rashtra" he has promised sotto voce to the bigots.

On the contrary, Modi's carefully-crafted image of forceful governance is taking a beating from the 69 per cent who gave him thumbs down in the 2014 election. Like bushfires, dissent is springing from every nook and cranny. These spontaneous protests have discombobulated him. The indefatigable campaigner came steadily unglued in Bihar, reverting to a nakedly bigoted message.

Asked to run interference, his spokespersons, in government and others like the puerile Chetan Bhagat, have raised a whataboutery defence, seeking to discredit the artists, scholars and scientists who have spoken out against the increasingly-evident Hindutva agenda: they are "Congress supporters who didn't protest in 1984" and theirs is "manufactured dissent."

When that didn't wash, they cursed the protest, calling it a campaign of calumny against the BJP by leftists and pseudo-intellectuals. Perhaps their most disingenuous defence is that the hate incidents happened in states that are not ruled by the BJP, ignoring the fact that the perpetrators were self-proclaimed supporters of the saffron calling, including union ministers, Members of Parliament and sundry state-level leaders.

About the only truth to emanate from the saffron defenders is this: the protestors cannot accept the BJP as ruling party and Modi as prime minister. This is largely because of their not-so-hidden Hindutva agenda. It is apparent that the narrow, divisive worldview does not resonate beyond fringe groups and that Modi and his supporters are mistaken in their loudly stated belief they represent the vast majority. Hobbled at first by a small but determined opposition in Parliament, now they face an existential challenge from the liberal legacy of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel.

There promises to be no rest for the ruling dispensation until 2019; the fires of dissent will only continue to spread.

(An edited version of this post will appear in DailyO.in, November 2015.)

Grim harvest of failed education system

Digital India, Make in India, Clean India, Smart Cities... these are slogans supporters of embattled prime minister Narendra Modi chorus to emphasise the primacy of his “development and growth” agenda. On the other hand, ghar wapsi, love jihad, Hindu rashtra, bans on beef, books and broadcasts… these are slogans supporters of empowered prime minister Narendra Modi raise to assert the primacy of hindutva.

Numerous commentators have remarked on the lack of progress of the modernist charter while lamenting the spread of the primordial agenda. Supporters say the prime minister’s development plans are being held hostage by “fringe elements”. Opponents challenge this, saying the hindutva project is Mr. Modi’s main plank.

And thus the political debate goes on, nightly on television and in the newspapers every morning. What’s indisputable is that India is caught in a bind, with the whole world watching. There are two reasons why the world is watching: one, the prime minister is an avid traveller who basks in the company of the world’s who’s who. He is adept at showcasing his forays in the Indian media and before large and adulatory NRI audiences.

The other reason why all eyes are on India is because of reports that primordial formations are threatening to derail India’s democracy. While Modi’s global tours go unreported in the mainstream world media, the killings, bans, and bigotry are prominently displayed in pixels and print the world over.

Given such alarming reports in global media, who will take the prime minister’s invitation to build modern India seriously? Even as Mr. Modi tries to assure the world of his commitment to diversity and democracy, his partners in the saffron brotherhood blacken faces of dissenters, commit hate crimes against minorities, and talk menacingly about regulating the media.

In Mumbai, the brazen threats of the Shiv Sena, an ally of the BJP led by Mr. Modi, forced the cricket authorities to withdraw all Pakistani umpires and commentators from the remainder of the India-South Africa series. It’s the same with utterances and speeches of senior saffron sages about the need to regulate the media.

How this stand-off between economic modernisation and the authoritarian and revivalist agenda will be resolved is difficult to say. In a nation with a burgeoning middle class, the tendency would be to favour the former. This assumes that the middle class is the repository of enlightened liberal values and as such a bulwark against what the Indian press used to call “fissiparous tendencies”. I don’t think the assumption can stand scrutiny. Here’s why.

Historically, Indian policymakers have ignored elementary education and vocational training in favour of higher education and professional development. The result is an educated elite listing in the storm-tossed sea of a poorly educated majority. Even within the elite class, the emphasis is on engineering and medicine, management and accountancy. Middle class children, especially male, are encouraged, forced and nudged into the study of these streams to land steady jobs. Liberal arts disciplines such as literature, history, language and philosophy are dismissed as unworthy, okay for girls.

Despite heavily subsidised bias in its favour, the higher education system has failed miserably. It produces a vast pool of middle class graduates, ill-equipped to meet the demands of a modernising economy. Unable to find jobs, they are recruited by political parties to fight nefarious numbers wars that determine political outcomes. Easily manipulated, these youth become the foot soldiers of atavistic campaigns against change. As such, they form the bulk of illiberal forces threatening to take India back to the Stone Age.

On the other hand, the higher education system also produces some world-class scientists, engineers, lawyers and doctors, managers and technocrats. But decades of command-and-control industry policies have impaired the ability of the economy to provide jobs and business opportunities. Caught in the socialist quagmire, shiploads of the best graduates have migrated westward, contributing to India’s ‘brain drain’. True, the best middle-class graduates did well in the US and elsewhere but the disruption took its toll and they became implacably opposed to licence-permit raj and its purveyors.

Therefore, like those they left behind, they too became supporters of illiberal forces. These are the groups that turn out in huge numbers to hear Mr. Modi rant and rave against the previous regime in New York, California, Australia and elsewhere. Thus the top layer of the education system and its vast middling layer have fused into an aggrieved segment, embracing religious and cultural revivalism and chauvinist causes, harbouring vague hopes of seeing India emerge as a “global power”.

This is the whirlwind the country reaped in the 2014 election. With just 31 percent of the national vote in their favour, majoritarian political forces are poised to hack away at the carefully-nurtured edifice of constitutionalism. In the final analysis the education system bears a major share of responsibility for the growing atavism and intolerance spreading across the country.

(An edited version of this post appeared in Education World, November 2015)

It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again | The Wire

It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again | The Wire

The transformation of the NDA government from a harbinger of purposive leadership into the gang that couldn’t shoot straight is one of the fastest rides downhill in Indian politics. Not even the worst critics of Narendra Modi expected such a precipitous fall. Its crisis management has been instinctive rather than considered. First dismissing stories about the transgressions of various government ministers as trivial and then trying to brazen it out are sure signs of a rattled leadership. Ministers, party leaders, RSS workers, all have been trotted out to defend the government that nonetheless has become the butt of ridicule in the media.

Watching events unfold, I am reminded of the Watergate crisis that engulfed the Nixon administration. On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested trying to plant listening devices in the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex in the heart of Washington DC. As the press picked up on the story, Nixon and his aides pooh-poohed it as coverage of a “third-rate burglary.” But the story persisted and grew bigger, revealing evidence of the involvement of top White House aides in an attempted cover up. As events spiraled, it became clear that the Nixon administration had indulged in criminal attempts to influence the outcome of the impending presidential election in November 1972. The rest is history.

The way Nixon and his aides handled the Watergate crisis is instructive as we try to understand the manner in which Modi and unknown aides have dealt with recent media controversies involving senior members of his government and party. Nixon debunked the Watergate burglary coverage as not really worthy of his attention, busy as he was with his re-election campaign and the big issues of world peace. Next step was an elaborate cover up that stretched across the administration from the White House to the Department of Justice to the CIA and the FBI to Nixon’s Republican cronies. Finally, Nixon and his aides were compelled to respond. Even then, they hedged, releasing bits of information…morsels of truth, while withholding damaging material to ensure “plausible deniability.”

This “limited hangout” defence was instinctive, a play by play response and clearly not a well thought out strategy. The assumption seemed to be that it would disappear after the election, which Nixon was widely predicted to win. The Viet Nam war and the protests against it had polarized the electorate. Nixon and his aides believed this would work to their advantage and it did. Nixon won in a landslide.

At the root of this defence was the conviction that the electoral victory would overwhelm the crisis. Nixon believed he could make Watergate disappear once he became president because it was mainly the adversarial press that was responsible for the problem. His vice president, Spiro Agnew, famously coined the phrase: nattering nabobs of negativism. Nixon always held a very dim view of the press. This was evident as far back as 1962 when he blamed his loss in the California gubernatorial election on the press and told a large assemblage of reporters in Los Angeles, “You don’t have Richard Nixon to kick around any more.” His distrust of the media was matched by his visceral hatred for the liberal East Coast establishment exemplified by the Kennedy family; he lost the presidency to John Kennedy in 1960 by a very small margin.

This divisive tendency was carried over into his subsequent presidential campaigns in 1968 and 1972. In the decade from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, America became visibly polarized: flag-waving nationalists and social conservatives on the right; liberals, the academy and a rainbow coalition of radicals, feminists and alternative lifestyle advocates on the left. The polarization was manifest in the popular culture of music, television shows, theatre, dance and films. After Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and the ignominious exit from Viet Nam in 1975, bridges began to come up over the troubled waters.

There are striking similarities between America then and India. Like Nixon, Modi seems to believe in the supremacy of an electoral victory over all matters of law and propriety; he succeeded in polarizing society wherein the “silent majority” of traditional Hindus and the muscular Hindutva minority comprise his mandate and his political strength. He has also made it his mission to spread hatred towards the secular, liberal and westernized segments of society. His distrust for and derision of the media is easily ascertained by a search on YouTube.

In the end, Modi’s assumption is that with an unassailable majority in Parliament, he can afford to ignore the swirling controversies. The “limited hangout” defence comes easy to him. He has used it in Gujarat: instead of answering for the massacre of hundreds of Muslims in 2002, he polarised the state and made it about Gujarati pride and then segued to good governance.

Modi commands an unshakable majority in Parliament but with just 31 per cent of the vote. He will have to answer to the 69 per cent for the transgressions of his minions and to the chunk of the 31 per cent that voted for his promise of development and good governance he made on the campaign trail. There will be more disclosures, more fires to put out: a Pankaja Munde here, a Smriti Irani there; a Rohini Salian, an L K Advani, a Yashwant Sinha…this is just the beginning.

Postscript: The “limited hangout” defence failed. On August 9, 1974, President Richard Milhous Nixon became the first president in the history of the United States to resign. Several of his aides went on to serve jail sentences

Rajiv Desai is Chairman and CEO, Comma Consulting, a public affairs consulting firm. He was also a member of the media advisory board of the Indian National Congress