Not just about Modi

Kerala has a charismatic and erudite MP in Shashi Tharoor, one who is recognised and admired across India. His telegenic personality and his books have played a big part in ensuring his enduring popularity. Many young Indians, transcending regional and religious divides, amongst them several of my students at the Indian Institute of Science, consider him best qualified to be our country’s Prime Minister.

Over the last few years, Tharoor has been busy burnishing his credentials — as a passionate patriot railing against the depredations of colonialism in his tour de force An Era of Darkness, as a liberal Hindu, confident in his faith firmly committed to secularism through his thoughtful book, Why I Am a Hindu and, as an informed citizen, deeply disturbed by recent developments in our country with his latest work The Paradoxical Prime Minister — Narendra Modi and His India.

Muscular nationalism

The last, reviewed here, is arguably the most important of the three books Tharoor has turned out in quick succession. It deserves to be read, as much to get a grip on Modi and his brand of muscular nationalism, as to visualise an India that is compassionate, fair to all, and builds on its strengths.

Ostensibly, The Paradoxical Prime Minister, is a book that sets out to nail Modi for his strident form of nationalism, for wearying the country with promises he never intended to keep and for inflicting wholly avoidable pain on all Indians through a peremptory demonetisation programme and a botched roll out of the Goods and Services Tax. There is no doubt that under Modi’s watch, India’s secularism has taken a beating. Far from taking on the more rabid anti-Islamic elements in the BJP, Modi has given them free rein, leading to lynchings and cow-vigilantism on a vast and absurd scale. His selection of the Muslim baiting, Yogi Adithyanath as Chief Minister of UP is proof enough for Tharoor, that Modi stands for a country where majoritarian Hinduism instead of secularism prevails.

In his book, Tharoor — a trifle unfairly — rubbishes Modi’s much-touted successes as Chief Minister of Gujarat and is derisive of his record as Prime Minister, which, according to him is abysmal in economic and political terms.

If there are any bright spots, they are, according to Tharoor, ones that Modi inherited from the UPA, such as the MGNREGS and Aadhaar as well as several others re-branded by the NDA. Tharoor asserts that every major policy initiative taken by Modi on his own — including foreign policy — has been whimsical and foolhardy.

Tharoor’s Modi comes out as a petty and bigoted individual who is self-opinionated, arrogant and lacking intellectual depth. Modi’s claim to being a man of austere habits, is all hogwash according to Tharoor, especially since it is at odds “with his expensive Bvlgari designer glasses, his Mount Blanc pens and his Movado watch”.

By aggregating everything wrong Modi has committed in one book, Tharoor has made it an indispensable source to take on Modi in the forthcoming general elections. However, the book is much more than just an anti-Modi tirade.

By placing all of India’s ills — unfairly at times — at Modi’s doors, Tharoor has achieved the unthinkable — of being obliquely critical of the Congress Party to which he belongs, for its past failings without once explicitly saying so. His underlying message to his party is: “Modi, fortunately, has done very little to correct our mistakes, let’s do so ourselves should we get another stab at power.”

Congress legacy

It is common knowledge that India’s woeful infrastructure, especially the pathetic state of its ports, roads and railways compared to China’s, are the outcome of decades of corrupt political patronage under successive Congress regimes since Independence.

The fact that India’s diplomatic establishment is too puny to service a country as large as ours, cannot be blamed on Modi. Tharoor’s charge that the Finance Ministry is a huge impediment to government decision-making, points to a long-felt need for a deep overhaul of government rules and procedures that successive — mostly Congress — administrations since Independence have failed to carry out.

To anyone reading his book it will be obvious that Tharoor is aware that it was under Congress watch, spread over decades, that India’s school and higher education as well as vocational training systems failed, leaving the country with the world’s largest number of under-educated, under-skilled and unskilled young people, practically negating the demographic bump India presently enjoys.

There are several slips in Tharoor’s book. Contrary to what Tharoor contends, we’ve never got it right with Pakistan or China. He charges Modi — a trifle too prematurely it turns out — of alienating some of our smaller neighbours which, like Malaysia, are now wiser after being singed by usurious Chinese loans. He accuses Modi of wrongly claiming that India was an $8-trillion economy in 2015 when, measured in PPP terms, it indeed was just that, then.

Tharoor also glosses over the fact that, but for the extraordinary shortcomings of UPA 2 — unprecedented and unchecked corruption being only one of them — it is unlikely that Modi would be Prime Minister today. The imposition of Hindi on the rest of India is not, as Tharoor alleges, of Modi’s making. It has been work-in -progress almost from the time India became a republic.

Tharoor seeks to establish himself as a well-informed public personality who not only is well aware of the issues that have long stifled India’s growth but also knows how to fix them. The book then, is clearly not just about Modi. Ambitious as always, Tharoor’s book is a clear proclamation that he is readying himself for a much bigger role in national politics — as a future consensus candidate for Prime Ministership should the opportunity arise? Very possibly!

The reviewer taught public policy and contemporary history at the Indian Institute of Science-Bengaluru.

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