Delhi polls: PM Modi doesn’t get it

New Delhi: Narendra Modi is the fulcrum around which the Bharatiya Janata Party revolves. He brought the jaded party to life even before he single-handedly won the Lok Sabha election for the saffron platform. He is said to possess an uncommon political touch and formidable skills of political communication. This implies a high order connect with voters. But the Prime Minister seems to have read the recent Delhi poll result all wrong.

He has failed to see that it’s his political persona that has been pulverised, not his party’s local organisational prowess. At around 32 per cent, the BJP organisation did deliver its core vote, which has stood around this mark since the late Nineties in Delhi even as it took the beating of a lifetime.

It is Mr Modi who couldn’t add value, though that’s exactly what he was supposed to do. His style (the Rs 10 lakh suit with his name inscribed all over it is still fresh in the public mind), and the substance of his message, had an effect that as the opposite of what was intended.

In a case such as this, there can be no room for a fall guy not even the BJP chief Amit Shah (who anyway only does what his master bids), whose ungainly authoritarian ways put off most in the BJP, not least because he is viewed more and more as an interloper in senior party circles who is also a snoop. Few appreciate that the poor blighter has no volition of his own. There cannot be a fall girl either, although Kiran Bedi didn’t exactly overwhelm.

Even after the great debacle, Mr Modi seems impervious to the message of the Delhi electorate, and that is why finance minister Arun Jaitley can insist that the direction of the Union Budget to be presented shortly is not going to change in spite of the election defeat of staggering proportions. The direction which has been announced, is avowedly pro-big business, and rests on voodoo economics. Make no mistake, this can only bring grief.

No one can argue with providing a predictable tax regime to encourage investors, or with the aim of offering an environment which creates ease of doing business in order to achieve a high-growth trajectory. But nothing that the government has done or said in the last nine months is aimed at alleviating the concerns of ordinary people. In a country like India, where the poor overwhelmingly dominate the rich in number terms, that has to be a part of the package.

World petroleum prices have tumbled and the Indian economy can breathe a lot easier compared to a year ago. Yet, the prices of daily necessities remain unconscionably high. Jobs are not being created. Income-generating avenues for the poor are being whittled down by downsizing schemes like National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. Subsidies that impact the poor in various ways seem to be heading for a cut.

In short, the Budget is likely to benefit mostly the well-off sections of society. Mr Modi has called himself a “chaiwalla” who has known the downstairs of life as a boy. If that’s really the case, then it has to be said that he is all set to betray his class, and the instrumentality will be the Union Budget.

This will be in line with his present style. During the Lok Sabha election campaign, Mr Modi flew around in the plane of a leading Gujarat industrialist. Nowadays, he seeks to make an impression with the stylish and expensive clothes he wears, changing his attire many times a day, evidently. That seems to mark the man, more than anything else.

In contrast, President Barack Obama, the world’s most powerful government leader, is reported to have just two suits, a blue and a grey, and sticks to an old watch. Gandhiji discarded his Western clothes and got into loincloth. Jawaharlal Nehru, born as an aristocrat, was not ashamed to wear darned collars.

The Prime Minister and his men have overlooked the fact that the Aam Aadmi Party’s sensational win and the BJP’s jolting defeat was brought about by Delhi’s proletariat. Three-fourths of the dalit and the Muslim (whose socio-economic status is the same as that of dalits, according to the Sachar Committee report) voters went with the AAP, although communal propaganda, meant to divide the poor, was rife. When their voting preference crystallised by polling day, the new coalition attracted others, and then there was an avalanche. The most distinctive feature of the Delhi election was the coming together of the poor against Mr Modi’s politics and style.

However, the message seems not to have gone home. It is the poor that the Modi government seems intent to disregard, and pass this off as sensible economics. It will naturally do so at its own peril. While the well-heeled are looking for tax breaks, the less fortunate know from their experience that all the present government has delivered so far is a pervasive atmosphere of communal tension and propaganda, and nothing of the development agenda whose realisation was made to look tantalisingly close through the clever use of words (achche din).

It is now being realised that it is not just the BJP that gains sustenance from Mr Modi’s impressive majority in the Lok Sabha, but also the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, from whose fount the sutras of the Sangh Parivar flow. Under this regime, the denunciation of Gandhi and the extolling of his assassin has become an everyday affair.

This is more than anyone had bargained for, and goes well beyond the BJP’s call of a Congress-mukt Bharat, or India freed of the (canker) of the Congress Party, which the saffron party has been propagating energetically of late. The RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has moved from the pedestrian to the pathetic with his recent call (yes, after the Delhi result) of “one country, one language, one people”. In the face of such distortions of our social life and national ethos, the Prime Minister remains tongue-tied.

It is time he stood up to counter any attempt to cause injury to the spirit of the Constitution. Remaining mum is not an option. The Prime Minister has to stand up and be counted.