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.)

Modi sarkar will be the biggest loser by 2019 polls

It is disingenuous in the extreme that television news and various other apologists for this regime seek to label the uproar over Rohith Vemula, the Hyderabad PhD scholar's suicide as "politics". What they mean is "partisan politics" in which rival political parties try to pry advantage from the mistakes of the ruling dispensation. That is how the BJP came to power...by jumping on the mistakes of the Congress party and leveraging them into a stentorian election campaign that promised the moon. It resulted in a first majority government since 1984 and heightened expectations.

The reality has hit like a bucket of cold water on a winter's morn. In the 20 months, the BJP government has piled up an Ozymandian mountain of mistakes and faux pas that has many people wondering about its governance skills. Even more questionable are the parliamentary skills on display; with a solid majority in the lower house, the government has been unable to engage the opposition to help pass bills that are sorely needed.

To begin with, these bills including the GST had been rancorously opposed by the BJP when it was in the opposition. After it formed the government, the BJP refused to grant Congress president Sonia Gandhi, the status of leader of the Opposition in the lower house. That's not exactly reaching across the aisle.

Coming back to the latest gaffe by the government, several ministers and the party's acolytes in the media have challenged Mr Vemula's Dalit status. This is the unkindest cut of all for it simply dismisses the complaint in his suicide letter that he faced many trials and tribulations during his abbreviated life. Now that is "politics." BJP leaders seem to think that by bandying technicalities, they will re-establish their standing with Dalit voters.

Many of the saffron lot also believe that the RSS chief's comments about reviewing reservations cost them the Bihar election. This is the banal thinking. In refusing to acknowledge the growing perception that there is a lack of transparency and accountability in the government's workings, that important campaign promises are seen to have been cast by the wayside, both the government and the ruling party find themselves cornered.

Also the prime minister's deafening silence on Dadri, Lalitgate and Vyapam has severely dented his credibility. It seems that saffron strategists believe that such lapses catch public attention momentarily and if immediate questions are parried, media coverage dies down and the chapter is closed. The Bihar results show how grievously they erred.

On the governance front, the strategy seems to be to blame the Opposition for the government's inability to get any legislation through the upper house. When you start off your innings with ad hominem attacks on your electoral adversaries and through gadfly cases, seek to harass the leadership,you can hardly expect any cooperation. With just 44 seats, the Congress has stalled the government at every turn. What's worse for the government, the Congress has emerged as a unifying force for opponents of saffron.

This was evident in Bihar and is looming as a major challenge in future elections, notably Uttar Pradesh. The Congress has shown a degree of maturity in accepting the leadership of Nitish Kumar's JDU) and Lalu Prasad's RJD in Bihar. It has similarly expressed its willingness to be part of a grand alliance in UP as well.

The truth is the BJP has no hope at all of attaining a majority in the upper house through 2019. The only option the government has is to deal with rather than to harangue and harass the Opposition, particularly the Congress. The prime minister has made some conciliatory remarks but election season is in the offing and attacks on opponents have begun. Modi's recent comments in Tamil Nadu show that Congress-baiting season is underway and will only get worse as the campaigns begin in Punjab, Assam, Bengal and Uttar Pradesh.

Prospects of a truce appear dimmer than ever. Inappropriate though the mixed metaphor may be in the circumstances, the plan to brand India as sodom before May 2014 may backfire. Without Opposition support, no bills will get passed and the resultant policy paralysis could make the government look like a pillar of salt.

Meeting heightened expectations may become impossible without passage of the GST bill and others pertaining to the revival and acceleration of economic growth. There goes the GDP; there goes double-digit growth; there goes the one-crore job revolution; there goes the credibility; there goes the entire ballgame.

(An edited version of this post will appear in Education World, February 13, 2016.)

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.)