The NDA’S seventh year report card
As the PM completes seven years in office, there are both positive and troubling aspects of the government’s record
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will complete seven years in office next week. While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has gone from strength to strength under Modi’s leadership, India’s polity, since 2014, has also entered an epoch of unprecedented polarisation.
The BJP and its supporters celebrate the last seven years as a period of revolutionary transformation in governance and welfare. The BJP’S opponents accuse the government of failing to deliver on critical challenges, the raging second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic only being the latest example. Reality, as is often the case, is complicated.
Let us first look at what is good about this government. Being an astute politician, Modi has been extremely proactive in focusing on certain utilitarian, but critical, aspects of governance to boost his government’s welfare credentials. Numerous welfare schemes such as the provision of LPG cylinders, toilets, houses, and now, piped water connections have helped raise the living standards of the poor. To be sure, a few of these schemes may be rechristened versions of earlier schemes, but even here, the government has been good at expediting progress, enhancing effectiveness, and building a political constituency around it.
There have also been reforms on the policy front such as a bankruptcy law and the roll-out of the Good and Services Tax (GST). These policies have broadly had bipartisan consensus, and were not implemented earlier because of either a lack of political consensus, often a result of opportunistic politics by parties (including the BJP), or sheer inertia to make India’s governance systems up to date with its rapidly transformed domestic capitalism. The centralisation of political power, thanks to the widespread (and correct) perception that the BJP’S phenomenal political success is largely contingent on Modi himself, has definitely helped here.
Then there are features of the government’s record that are not so good. A gradual weakening of institutions is of most concern here. A recent study by PRS Legislative Research has shown that the current government has pushed more ordinances in its seven years than the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) did in its 10 years in power. Many important laws, such as the three bills unleashing radical agricultural reforms, have been pushed through Parliament without sending them to the relevant parliamentary committees. Such acts amount to a direct undermining of democracy, for legislative scrutiny of the executive agenda is an essential prerequisite of our constitutional design. Independent institutions have also witnessed an erosion of their credibility, largely because they are seen as pliant to the executive.
There is also the issue of the BJP and senior functionaries in the government promoting communal weaponisation of policy and polity. The biggest example on this front is the politics around the Supreme Courtmandated National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam and the subsequent Citizenship (Amendment) Act or CAA. The communal tension such politics has created can erupt into ugly forms at any point of time, such as the Delhi riots of 2020.
To be sure, India is not experiencing a squeeze on institutions or pervasive communalism for the first time. What has changed is the magnitude of these problems. For the BJP, this has had mixed results electorally, but society has paid the price.
These traits of the Modi government flow from the basic philosophy of the current regime — where the ends justify the means, with the end in question being retaining the BJP’S political dominance. To be sure, acquiring and retaining political power is (and should be) the ambition of each serious political force. But every political victory of the BJP — and today’s BJP takes every election from panchayat to Parliament very seriously — is inferred as a vindication of the means deployed to secure the end in question. A loss is often interpreted as the need to double down on such policies. The victories are also seen as a public endorsement of all the government’s policies and decisions.
Such a philosophy creates a problem because even objective criticism of the government’s policies is dismissed as either incorrect or politically motivated. While politicians might have their own reasons for unleashing a policy and might or might not succeed in achieving the desired political objectives, this does not guarantee that there will not be any collateral damage from such moves. Policy decisions such as demonetisation, the hasty roll-out of GST or lack of necessary surveillance and preparation against a second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic (or even the flawed vaccine drive) fall in this category of actions by the Modi government. While an overwhelming majority of independent and credible subject experts have described such policies as incorrect, the BJP, by deploying its massive political capital, has ridden roughshod over such criticism.
There appears to be, thus, little room for dissent at the high table of policymaking once the political executive has floated or embraced an idea. No political leader, especially in today’s age, where policymaking is complex and multidisciplinary, can claim infallibility. The probability of going wrong on policymaking increases manifold once the primary motivation is the associated political dividend. This is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the current dispensation.
The regime might be going from strength to strength, but this is neither accompanied by the strengthening of State capacity nor social harmony. As is obvious, any challenge to this tendency will have to be political.
roshan.k@htlive.com The views expressed are personal