Modi government’s reality check
Aakar Patel fills in the information gaps between the administration’s many promises on governance and welfare and its performance
Did you know Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s penchant for acronyms and alliterations have produced 115 different names and terms in areas from foreign policy to welfare schemes over his tenure of seven years? PM CARES — Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations — is the most recent and well-known example. But there is also MAA — Mother’s Absolute Affection — to promote a scheme for breast-feeding; INCH — India China towards a Millennium of Exceptional Synergy; FDI — First Develop India; and 111 other such inane acronyms and nomenclatures. Every programme or a speech or a scheme is almost like a naming ceremony for the Modi government, which has resulted in a huge set of banal terms and abbreviations.
Aakar Patel’s book, Price of the Modi Years, is a laborious compendium of such highlights of Modi’s tenure as prime minister. There are 464 pages of information, data, analysis and news that summarise Modi’s stewardship. Predictably, the judgement is not rosy. Even if one were to set aside the author’s employer Amnesty International’s travails with this government, the book makes a persuasive case using facts and figures to show how shallow the Modi regime’s governance track record has been thus far.
It is now well-established that this government’s governance paradigm is “for the headlines, by the headlines and of the headlines”. The incessant obsession of this government to capture, manipulate, and distract people’s minds through new media narratives daily has forced people to flit fast from one story to another. Amid this deluge of new headlines and stories every day, it is very easy for the common person to lose sight of the larger governance canvas of promises and rhetoric. This book fills that gap commendably. It is a smart collection of all the various statements, promises, and commitments made by the incumbent government and holds them to account on each.
For example, in June 2014, the newly formed Modi government announced an ambitious project to clean the holy river of Ganga with a Namami Gange project and a budget of ~20,000 crore. In February 2017, the National Green Tribunal observed in one of its reports that “not a single drop of river Ganga has been cleaned”. By 2020, the budget was cut to ~375 crore and subsequently the project was wound up and folded into another mission called Jal Shakti. Many of us remember the Namami Gange project from when it was announced with much fanfare but few of us remembered to track its progress. This book does that remarkably well for the hundreds of such programmes and promises announced by the Modi government.
The book traverses a wide array of subjects and topics ranging from the abysmal state of India’s subservient media to this regime's economics to internal security strategy of Ajit Doval to the Muslim being a strawman for distraction in today’s India to the sorry state of the judiciary to the mishandling of China to attack on religious freedoms to Article 370 and many more. The book is not an erudite and scholarly analysis of policies and governance programmes. It is merely a journalistic compilation of the laundry list of announcements, events, incidents and mishaps of the Modi regime’s tenure, of which there are plenty. The book serves as a useful reference guide to the Modi government’s governance track record.
Arguably, one of the most under reported and under-appreciated face ts of the mo di government’ s failures is the spectacular collapse of india’ s foreign policy and national security strategy. how India went from being a friendly, respected and admired global power to being bullied and weakened by a confrontation with China isa story of a remarkable fall in a short span. pa tel has an entire chapter on this issue that is very well researched and argued, tracing the roots of this collapse to Do val’ s“cuckoo national security strategy based on spectacle, to complement mo di’ s school of diplomacy of grand gesture without depth”. The book dissects a speech given by do val in february 2014, much before he had an ink ling that he would be India’ s national security Advisor, to highlight the shallowness of the “Do val doctrine ”, which Subramanianswa my famous ly described at that time as a“national defence strategy in a fast foodcounter”!
In some issues such as the attack on religious freedoms, the author has strived to proffer explanations using Modi’s relationship with the RSS and their history. While these may be a reflection of the author’s personal biases, the facts and evidence presented by the author to argue his case are compelling.
The chapter on Covid-19 titled “Mahabharat” to refer to Modi’s famous prediction of how he would conquer the coronavirus in 21 days, is filled with numbers, data, facts and figures to portray the disastrous handling of the pandemic. By February 2020, the BJP adopted a formal resolution in which it claimed “with pride that India defeated Covid under the able, sensitive and visionary leadership of Narendra Modi”. In September 2020, Serum Institute’s owner Adar Poonawalla publicly pleaded with the government to allocate ~80,000 crore to procure vaccines for all Indians. Seven months later, by April 2021, the government placed vaccine orders for ~3,000 crore only, less than 5 per cent of the total cost of vaccinating all Indians. It is estimated that 1.6 million people died of Covid in India, subsequent to the BJP’S declaration of conquest of the virus.
Overall, it is an intelligent book, written lucidly and organised logically. The book’s value will only increase with time as our minds get more cluttered with more noisy headlines and distractions. This book is a stark reminder of how easy it is to lose the forest for the trees when one’s mind is mired in daily news and debates and the need to occasionally step back and look at the larger picture.