THERE are different ways to measure a government’s performance: against one’s expectations, against the promises made, and against its predecessor’s record. There are also multiple frameworks within which to judge: political, economic, social, institutional, and national security/international relations. As the Modi government heads into its home stretch, all of these invite judgment.

Before coming to any conclusions one must have as a backdrop the record of how popular the Modi government has been, and the extraordinary ratings that the prime minister has been getting. Pew Research shows that Modi’s ratings have been 80+ per cent positive all the way through till 2017, including after the demonetization of November 2016. The percentage of those who thought the current state of the economy was good improved in stages from 57 per cent in 2013 to 83 per cent in 2017. And those who were ‘satisfied with the direction of the country’ went up steadily from 29 per cent in 2013 to 70 per cent in 2017. There has been no poll in 2018.

Few prime ministers have received such ringing endorsements in opinion polls, sustained over three years. But was it a case of initial over-promise and subsequent message overkill? For it is striking how the poll findings of the past stand in sharp contrast to the results of the latest round of state elections, especially three in the northern heartland. Media reports during the campaign spoke of large-scale agricultural distress, disillusionment over the lack of jobs, continuing low-level corruption, problems in receiving ‘direct benefit transfers’ and the general riff that BJP governments have not delivered on the generic promise of ‘good days’. Two of these issues (agricultural distress and lack of jobs) deserve special attention, and I will revert to them shortly.

Has the government under-delivered? In terms of the headline economic numbers, growth during 2014-19, at an annual average of 7.3 per cent, would have been the same as in the previous five years, except that the numbers for the earlier years have been revised downwards (some months earlier they had been revised upward!). That Niti Aayog’s vice chairman, a political appointee, chose to release the numbers immediately raised a red flag. The new numbers also fly in the face of other evidence provided by hard numbers in areas like corporate sales and profits, credit growth, export and import growth, investment levels and other such verifiable data that reflect the tempo of economic activity with greater certainty than a complex construct like a GDP figure. On these ‘real’ indicators, the gap between the Singh years and the Modi years is so large (in Singh’s favour) that GDP numbers which say the opposite must invite serious questioning, if not ridicule.

 

It is also curious that under the new GDP calculation method introduced in 2015, growth rates for the second UPA government’s terminal years of 2012-14 had been revised sharply upward. Now, the back numbers for the years immediately before that have been revised downwards – supposedly using by and large the same methodology. The government has argued that this shows even-handedness in dealing with the numbers; in fact, they say the opposite about the latest exercise.

GDP numbers are never precise estimates. A great many assumptions go into calculating them, especially in a developing economy with a large informal sector that usually generates no hard data. Also, in sub-sectors of services (which as a whole accounts for over 60 per cent of GDP), like personal and community services, almost any number will be as good as any other number. How much does a barber earn, or someone making pakodas? On top of that, assigning weights to different sectors when their growth rates are different, and when the rates of inflation are different for say manufacturing and for agriculture, add more elements of judgmental intervention. Choices from among the options can mask political bias.

In the present case, downgrade the fastest-growing services sector’s growth rate, reduce its weight in the total, increase the adjustment for inflation, and overall GDP growth plummets. It is hard to judge intent, but a government that has not been able to deliver on faster growth, let alone on the promise of double-digit growth, will be prey to temptation – especially a government that is prone to assertions that nothing was done in the country prior to its advent, and prone also to exaggerated claims about its own record. A record of similar or higher growth by its much-derided predecessor government would have been a serious embarrassment.

 

The GDP fudge, as it is safe to term it, is of a piece with the clumsy attempt at using unsuitable and unreliable numbers to claim massive job creation – another topic on which Narendra Modi has faced sustained criticism because of his campaign promise of 10 million additional jobs every year. That data-massage too was midwifed by Niti Aayog, which got hold of data from the Employees Provident Fund Organization, then stepped over the line by giving individual employee data to two handpicked researchers (one from an IIM and the other from a government owned bank). The duo then used the numbers for a purpose which the data is not fit to determine: employment growth.

The unreliability of the data soon became obvious when EPFO repeatedly revised the data downwards month after month, while other researchers pointed out that the data for the period studied had enjoyed an unusual spike because of a drive to enrol more employers under EPFO. That raised questions about comparability with the previous year’s data, and therefore the claim of growth in employment.

 

Exaggerated claims and the Modi government are not strangers. A whole lot was claimed on behalf of demonetization in and after November 2016, but the objectives initially spelt out were not achieved (eg. tackling terrorist funding and counterfeit notes). Crucially, black money has not disappeared. On jobs, the prime minister-to-be had railed against jobless growth during the UPA years. When it came to his own government, and the promise of creating 10 million jobs annually, this is what Modi said in an interview – and it is worth quoting him at length.

‘When (the) economy is growing at a faster pace, in fact fastest among the major economies, how will the jobs market not expand? When investment into and the pace of execution of infrastructure projects like making roads, laying down rail lines, setting up power generation including solar parks and transmission lines is at all-time high, how come the jobs will not be created? Similarly, if there is significant growth in sales of commercial vehicles and passenger vehicles, does it not mean that jobs are being created? When FDI inflows are at an all-time high, will it not translate into manufacturing and job creation? From just two mobile manufacturing units in 2014 we have grown to 120. When such development in electronic manufacturing is taking place, will it not create jobs? Today, India has emerged as one of the top hubs of start-ups. Are they not creating jobs? App-based aggregators are flourishing in India across food, logistics, e-commerce, mobility solutions and many more such sectors. Are they not creating jobs? We all know the potential tourism has in creating jobs. Foreign tourist arrivals in India grew by 14 per cent last year. Domestic tourism has also grown. Will this not result in job creation?’

 

All of that makes perfect sense, except that overall investment in relation to GDP (inclusive of the roads, rail, power, etc that Modi mentioned) was significantly higher in the Singh years; so was the growth in automobile sales, exports and the like. Yet Modi saw those as years of jobless growth. Rhetoric aside, the Modi government’s real response to the jobs problem has been the Mudra refinance programme for micro and small businesses (hence Modi’s reference to pakoda-making also being a job). Once again, it is worth quoting the prime minister: ‘More than 13 crore Mudra loans have been given to our hardworking entrepreneurs. I have been told that over 3.5 crore of these loans have been given to first time entrepreneurs. Does every loan not create additional employment opportunities?’ That looks like a claim of at least 35 million jobs – in three-and-a-half years since Mudra’s launch. In other words, the promise of 10 million jobs has been fulfilled.

Yet, that is not the anecdotal message from young people interviewed by reporters during the recent election campaign in heartland states. In any case, the economic census reported in 2014 a total of 58.5 million enterprises (including one-man shows like bicycle repair shops). So how there could be 130 million Mudra loans to enterprises needs explaining; perhaps most of them were in reality consumption loans, not for productive enterprise. Equally, could 35 million new enterprises be added to an existing total of 58.5 million in three-and-a-half years? If so, that would be a story of transformation worth telling and re-telling. The more prosaic reality would seem to be that the numbers need to be understood better before claims can be made about the jobs created.

Among other notable examples of exaggerated claims or hopes, one goes back to early 2015. After the auction of coal blocks to private parties (the UPA coal scam had flowed from the refusal to do such auctions), the government claimed that, going by the auction bids, the revenue to the government from coal produced would be Rs 3.35 lakh crore over 30 years. No discounting of future inflation was done to get the net present value, as is the usual practice for such long-term projections – perhaps because that would have yielded a much smaller revenue claim. In the event, all that has been generated so far is a few thousand crores – or a fraction of the original claim.

 

But let’s get beyond these games with numbers, and focus on the real story. Which is that the Modi government’s economic record is not at all bad. Inflation has been lower than in previous periods, the fiscal deficit has been reduced despite greater tax transfers to state governments, the current account deficit (on the external account) also is lower than what it was at the beginning, and economic growth can be said to have been about the same as before – despite a lower investment rate. Tax collection has done well, raising the tax-to-GDP ratio to possibly a record level, and foreign investment has flowed in. For all its fatal flaws, demonetization combined with the introduction of the goods and services tax to bring millions more taxpayers into the net.

Some (not all) of the macro-economic record can be ascribed to luck, especially the movement of oil prices which were at record levels in 2013, but dropped by two-thirds from their peak. This helped to improve both the fiscal as well as trade numbers, and helped also to contain inflation. But it is equally true that the government used the opportunity provided by low oil prices to trim the petroleum subsidy bill sharply and to raise revenue, thereby reducing the fiscal deficit. And it set the policy target for inflation at four per cent, lower than the historical average. It is not clear that another government would have used the opportunity in the same way.

 

Still, the oil base to economic performance became clear in mid-2018 when oil climbed again. Suddenly the current account deficit expanded, inflation rose and the fiscal calculus was upset. Fortunately for the economy and for Modi, oil has fallen again and macro-economic balances are no longer under threat.

When one turns to the micro picture, it is not as attractive as the macro – the world’s fastest growing large economy and all that. Companies have struggled with heavy debt burdens, corporate performance throughout these past four-plus years has been uninspiring, and investment has been low. What is worse, exports have been mostly flat – the worst record in a quarter-century or more. The government has felt compelled by the worsening trade balance to reverse a long record of tariff cuts and raise protective walls for a whole range of products – the first real reversal of reform since 1991. The indifferent performance of the stock market underlines the reality of an indifferent period for Corporate India, which had rooted so loudly for the Modi government. Informal sounding of corporate opinion suggests that the ardour has cooled.

An essential piece of this troubled story is the trouble with banks, especially the government owned ones that account for 70 per cent of the system. The problem with bad loans was fudged during the Singh years, as a lending boom ended with problem-ridden infrastructure projects and therefore loans that could not be repaid. In early 2015 the Reserve Bank governor called a halt to the window dressing and demanded honest accounting, for which he gave a two year deadline. Approaching the end of that deadline, RBI enforced tough discipline by forcing banks to take bad loan accounts through the newly legislated bankruptcy process, and put the worst performing banks in tight corsets so that they would not do more damage. Encouraging the growth of healthy banks while holding back the others was a logical solution.

 

This is a problem that the Modi government inherited, and it looked at one stage that the worst was over. Then the defaults by Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services surfaced, with the sums involved being a staggering one lakh crore rupees. Liquidity for other non-banking financial companies dried up in the wake of ensuing market nervousness, mutual funds that had invested in NBFC bonds booked losses, and stock market valuations fell by about 15 per cent in a couple of months. Differences over how to deal with the situation resulted in an RBI-government face-off. It appeared at one stage that a blowout had been avoided, but the governor’s eventual resignation added one more to the list of autonomous institutions that have faced pressure or suffered during Modi’s term. Blame for the situation has to be parcelled out, with some going to the RBI. The government’s inability to offer systemic solutions is also evident, and politicizing the RBI board is no substitute.

What of a central premise of the 2014 campaign, that a government led by Narendra Modi, who had successfully worked the ‘Gujarat development model’, would naturally do better than the by-then deeply discredited Manmohan Singh government? Narendra Modi has of course brought a new energy to the government’s functioning. More than most prime ministers since Nehru, he has harped constantly in his speeches on government programmes and development goals, including unlikely ones like toilets. He has not been afraid to publicly set and then go after ambitious targets – like multiplying five-fold the target for solar energy capacity, and taking banking to all. In a largely techno-illiterate political class, he has understood the power and use of technology to improve the efficacy of government programmes. On the other hand, his ignorance of and disdain for standard economics led him to fundamentally misread the nature of black money – which is not a fixed amount to be eliminated on a chosen date but a flow of economic activity that continuously converts white into black and black into white.

 

Flowing from his frustrating experience with the Planning Commission when he was chief minister, Modi gave up on the whole business of planning with its integrated view of the economy, abolished the commission, and often gave short shrift to the opinions of economists. In their place, he opted for his version of an itemized ‘20-point programme’ which he considered transformational: specific initiatives addressing core issues, usually with ambitious targets. He also decided against risking political capital to attempt risky reforms, playing it safe on such issues as privatization and labour law reform. The price of the latter, one could argue, has been the dud that is the Make in India programme and the failure to create enough quality jobs.

The preference for a strong currency, which BJP acolytes had talked about during the 2014 campaign because they mistakenly assumed that a strong currency would create a strong economy (most economists would argue that it works the other way round), was another mistake and has extracted its price in terms of stagnant exports. Other countries in the region, like Bangladesh, Vietnam and Philippines, have done better.

 

That does not mean there have been no reforms. The new law on bankruptcy is landmark legislation, and fundamentally changes the power balance between lender and borrower, to the advantage of the lender. Businessmen will be more careful when borrowing in future, knowing they could lose their company. The future trend in terms of loans going bad should therefore be better than has been the case so far. Then there is the institutionalizing of monetary policy through the setting up of a monetary policy committee. And the goods and services tax, though botched in its design and bungled in the manner of its introduction, will prove to be transformative in many ways, including by bringing more of the economy into the properly accounted modern sector, which also happens to have better labour practices.

Let’s look at the ‘20 points’: It is evident to all that Modi has pushed the bureaucracy hard to deliver, with some successes to show: More than doubling the pace of highway construction; getting large parts of the country to become open-defecation-free through the Swachh Bharat initiative; scaling up sharply the renewable energy programme, especially solar energy, and thereby earning the country brownie points in the dialogue on climate change; investing massively in the railways, hitherto starved of funds, with improvements in speed, carrying capacity and quality of service likely to show further down the road; bringing about greater inclusiveness through the Jan Dhan accounts and the Ujjwal programme on subsidized cooking gas; and so on. These are considerable achievements, even if some of the claims are exaggerated – as indeed was the case with the ‘Gujarat model’ itself.

 

Inevitably, some programmes have not worked out quite so well. Most importantly, the skill development programme has been a virtual non-starter, as has the ‘Make in India’ initiative in the context of its ambitious goal of increasing the share of manufacturing in GDP. Both involved failures in conceptualization: skills training has little meaning without a job at the end of the training, as is provided through apprenticeship, which should have been the real game. Manufacturing has been stymied by, among other things, a strong rupee and the failure to deliver labour market reform, and a still underperforming infrastructure. Mudra has notched up impressive numbers, but of what consequence is unclear. And the Ganga is no cleaner or healthier than before.

Latter day initiatives, like comprehensive medical insurance cover for the poor, are still being rolled out. Like the GST, this has been launched in a hurry, without sufficient time for preparatory action (capacity has to be created in terms of hospital beds and medical staff), in a sector known for widespread professional malpractice. Fingers must be kept firmly crossed as the coverage of the scheme gets extended. Still, like the GST, it should make a difference over time. On this as well as the drive to promote agricultural producer companies, develop manufacturing clusters and also the railway investment programme (which includes dedicated freight corridors), Modi is right in saying that he needs more time to show results. It is not certain that he will get it.

What seems to be proving politically costly is that there has been no coherent or comprehensive plan to improve the lot of farmers, notwithstanding promises of higher grain procurement prices. The neem coating of urea, an innovative and successful project for preventing the diversion of heavily subsidized urea to non-agricultural purposes, was mentioned frequently in Modi’s speeches at one stage but is not heard of any more as farmers have left their fields and gone on marches in protest.

Nor has much been heard of the promise of less water-intensive agriculture, the promise having been ‘more crop, per drop’. Subsidized pump sets and free electricity to farmers do not encourage them to draw less groundwater, whose table level drops relentlessly every year and threatens serious water scarcity. If anything, the incentives for growing the most water-intensive crops (sugar-cane and paddy) in water scarce areas have only increased.

 

The agricultural irony is most acute in Madhya Pradesh, which has been the most obvious success story of the past decade, but also its biggest failure. The state has reported sustained agricultural growth at a scarcely believable eight per cent annual rate that is more usually associated with industry. You would think farmers had doubled incomes as a result. Yet, in the recent election campaign, one of the biggest issues to figure was anger among farmers – the most frequent complaint being poor prices for their produce, and promised benefits not being available in practice.

The crisis could have been foreseen: Dramatic increase in supply without assured demand will naturally lead to price drops. For perishable products, the price drop can be catastro-phic. The public distribution system does not cover most of the new crops being grown in greater quantities in MP and elsewhere. The crisis is most frequent in short duration crops captured in the new acronym of TOP, for tomatoes, onions and potatoes. As agricultural diversification has progressed, the combined tonnage for these and other crops in the vegetable-fruits category is now about the same as that for grain if not more.

 

The situation cries out for innovative policies to deal with the problem of sharp supply variations, not palliatives like loan write-offs. The MP government’s belated attempt at a price assurance scheme was quickly exploited by traders (as an aside, India’s business communities should not be under estimated for their inventiveness, demonstrated also in the speed and scale at which black money got converted into white following demonetization, so that virtually all the currency in existence eventually came back to the RBI). In its final year, the government has hit on the idea that it could have borrowed early from the success of the milk programme: producer companies that close the gap between farmgate and retail prices for agricultural produce while diverting seasonal surpluses into food processing units. How well the idea gets implemented remains to be seen.

On another vital front where large budgets are involved, the promised indigenization of defence hardware acquisitions, and better maintenance of existing hardware with the forces, has not materialized. Imports were to drop from 60 per cent of defence purchases to 30 per cent. But orders have been placed abroad for aircraft, helicopters, missiles and frigates, while little has been done to upgrade domestic production capabilities. Specifically, the once-promising Tejas fighter aircraft has been sabotaged by repeated changes in air force requirements. The pace at which the country’s two leading shipyards build destroyers, frigates and corvettes has shown no improvement (it goes without saying that China seems to build them in about a third of the time). And the country continues to import even carbines and assault rifles. The parallel programme to induct the private sector into defence production has made all too little progress.

Some successes, like the sharply improved ranking on the World Bank’s Ease of Business parameters, have been achieved through both genuine changes to processes and gaming of the system. Other international rankings (Human Development Index, Competitiveness, Hunger, etc) do not show comparable improvements, if any, though there is an acknowledgment of improved economic performance from one of the international rating agencies. Part of the problem has been that the government has focused most of its efforts and expenditure on the hard infrastructure, not the soft ones (health and education).

 

Institutional weakening during the Modi regime is frequently raised as a matter of concern. The most important issue, which has received little attention other than a passing mention by the Supreme Court, is the misuse of the provision on money bills to bypass the Rajya Sabha and indeed to render it irrelevant when it posed a stumbling block. The protests by the four senior-most judges of the Supreme Court rang alarm bells, even as the government became selective in the manner of its approval of Supreme Court judges recommended by the judges’ colloquium.

The scope of the transformative Right to Information law has been whittled away. The Lok Pal is yet to be appointed. The civil war in the Central Bureau of Investigation tells its own story of institutional misuse and even rot, while the fracas with the Reserve Bank and the overt threat to its autonomy could have been avoided. The first resignation by a governor in 60 years will be a black mark on Modi’s tenure. The previous victim of institutional capture was the Central Statistical Organization. Finally, the prime minister’s hostility to, and disdain for, the media is well known. Editors of leading publications have lost their jobs under government pressure – though that has happened during previous regimes too.

 

In much of this, as ruling party stalwarts correctly argue in the usual whataboutery, the BJP has merely taken a page from the Congress and Communist playbook. Institutional decline and capture set in long before the BJP came to power, and the BJP is a long way yet from the extent to which the Communists in West Bengal fused government and party into a seamless operational reality. But it is indicative of how far the BJP has moved from its principled positions when in opposition that Prasar Bharati, conceived of by L.K. Advani as an autonomous broadcasting organization, has been reduced to a government appendage.

There was a period when the country’s institutions seemed to be coming into their own. The Election Commission became a more credible body starting in the 1990s, as did the Comptroller and Auditor General a decade later. Civil society organizations led campaigns for transparency in government through the Right to Information law, and sought justice for the marginalized through public interest litigation in the highest court, where the judges were sensitive to the inequality of access to the top court.

Independent regulators for various business sectors added to the number of autonomous institutions, though of course regulatory capture was not unknown. The media acquired greater salience, while the social media was expected to democratize access to the public space. If the strength of a nation state is ultimately the strength of its institutions, then many of India’s institutions were indicators of new strength – though on the other hand the decline in Parliament’s functioning continued.

 

All of this has not evaporated, but the threats are obvious. Armies of abusive trolls bully dissenters. The current hostility to civil society organizations is evident, as is the effort to squeeze their sources of funds and launch prosecutions. Simultaneously there is the drive to bring the favoured organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, into the frame in every way possible: Its members get appointed to key government, academic and cultural positions, their books get prescribed for reading, and RSS front organizations get plenty of funding – the whole effort aimed at reorienting the country’s ethos towards majoritarianism, rewriting history and claiming mythical glories as facts.

On foreign policy, many claims have been made. In truth, though, the most important change is that China has made more inroads into India’s immediate neighbours, most of which already had stronger trade ties and better defence relationships with China than India. But while India has lost ground in its neighbourhood, it has gained in profile and standing globally – helped in part by superior economic performance, the growing attractiveness of the Indian market, India’s potential as a country that could swing the regional power balance, and also by Modi’s active personal diplomacy.

What is notable is the extreme realism of the present (as opposed to initial) stance vis-a-vis China, even as aggressive posturing continues vis-à-vis Pakistan, which at one-ninth of the Indian economy, one-sixth of India’s population and one-seventh of its defence budget, is a nuisance that, because of its own sorry record, has lost international traction in every country other than China.

 

The BJP’s political record through this period has been most impressive, dimmed somewhat by the losses in elections to three state assemblies north of the Vindhyas. Still, the BJP rules in about half the states, alone or in partnership with others. It has made significant inroads into Assam and the rest of the northeast, and the Sabarimala issue may well give it a launch pad in Kerala where it has so far had no presence. It has governments in Maharashtra, Goa, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand Assam, and the majority of the small hill states in the northeast. All these together account for about 250 seats in the Lok Sabha. In addition, the BJP is the principal opposition in seven major states (Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh,West Bengal, Odisha and Punjab, in addition to Karnataka – which have another 170 seats, and take the party’s contestable seats total to about 420. Most of the rest are in four southern states: Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

This is a dramatic expansion of the party’s geographical base, accompanied probably by deepening penetration as well. When Narendra Modi stepped on to the national stage in 2013, ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, and was joined soon after by compatriot Amit Shah as the party president, few even among the party faithful would have expected such dominance. The latest assembly elections put the BJP on the back foot, and the key question is whether, in the coming Lok Sabha elections, the Modi factor will be a plus factor as it has been all along, or cease to be that. On that will depend whether the BJP gets past the 200-seat mark and leads a coalition government, or is forced to go back to the opposition benches.

Whichever way the cards fall, it will not alter the seminal shift that has taken place over these past five years and more, in much of the country’s political centre, towards the Hindu Right. The Congress stress on the values embedded in its original creed (secularism and syncretic nationalism), expressed through slogans like ‘unity in diversity’ and given practical shape through such devices as special rights for minorities, has been sidelined for tactical reasons by the very party that espoused them. Arun Shourie in 2015 dismissed the BJP’s economic policies as ‘Congress plus cow’. Now it is the Congress that has adopted the cow. In the new reality, Muslim candidates have had next to no role in electoral politics, and no real defence against lynchings, while Rahul Gandhi as an upper caste Shiv Bhakt woos the Hindu vote.

 

This is political victory for those who would like to claim, in practical if not de jure terms, the equivalent of what Israel declared in July: that it is a Jewish nation state (thereby formally reducing Arabs who make up one-fifth of the country’s nine million population to second class status).

Majoritarian nationalism has overtaken patriotism – the difference being, as George Orwell explained, that patriotism is love for one’s country while nationalism seeks to put down the other guy’s country. The operational difference is that, whereas once government officials were debarred from membership of the RSS, which is the principal architect of the Hindutva project, the periodically banned organization’s members are now state governors, university vice chancellors, heads of a variety of cultural and educational bodies, and (perhaps most importantly) authors of school and college textbooks and curricula.

 

How much the textbooks have been redirected, not just to rewrite history in predictable ways when it comes to Muslim rulers of the past but also to advocate dangerous political philosophies, has been spelt out most clearly in a recent article in the distant New York Review of Books. That it should take a foreign publication to record the issue in detail points once more to the failures of the Indian media in holding a mirror to changing reality, even as significant elements of what passes for the TV news media have become bandmasters and loudspeakers for the ruling ethos. It is worth quoting some passages from the NYRB article by Alex Traub.

* Gujarat’s eighth-grade book insists that ‘awareness regarding cooperating with the security agencies has to be developed.’ Social harmony should be pursued even at the expense of individual rights: Rajasthan’s seventh-grade book recommends, ‘We should refrain from negative acts like strikes.’

* The English translation of Rajasthan’s social sciences book for the tenth grade lists the ‘demerits of democracy’, including that ‘democracy teaches a person to be selfish, cunning and illusive’, that democracies do not produce economic development, and that they are weak in times of crisis.

* Amid surprisingly frequent criticism (in a Gujarat textbook) of the Treaty of Versailles and an enumeration of Mussolini’s successes, the new twelfth-grade history book praises Hitler at length: ‘Hitler made a strong German organization with the help of [the] Nazi party and attained great honour for this. By favouring German civilians and by opposing Jews and by his new economic policies, he made Germany a prosperous country... He transformed the lives of the people of Germany within a very short period by taking strict measures. He safe guarded [sic] the country from hardships and accomplished many things.’

It is possible that some of the institutional capture may be rolled back, should a new political dispensation take charge in the states, or in New Delhi in the coming summer, but it is unlikely that the political centre can be shifted back to where it was, pre-Modi. What has come about in these past five years is seminal change, building on momentum generated progressively from the late 1980s.

 

Associated changes have come along, as often happens when nationalism is on the ascendant. Hostility to the media, rampaging trolls on the social media, delegitimization of the role played by the opposition (referred to as rats and snakes by the BJP president), misuse of the government’s various investigative and prosecutorial agencies to target the regime’s critics, a take-no-prisoners approach to politics, implicit sanction for vigilante violence and murder, and misuse of the law on sedition that should have been abolished long ago: all of this sets loose an ugliness in the air that was not there previously. So much so that the shooting of a police officer by a mob is dimissed as an accident. A system that aspired once to being a liberal democracy is now headed towards becoming a decidedly illiberal polity, aided by the breakdown of law and order.

The current winners in the game put forward a quite different narrative: That the country is only now emerging from a post-colonial mentality, its long-held religious traditions and cultural expressions are getting a proper airing for the first time, and its striving for greatness is being actualized by the new order in the wake of improved economic performance that has inculcated a new confidence. This thesis is buttressed by the promise of a new, more purposeful politics, and what are usually termed transformative economic programmes and policies.

 

Such a narrative has been given credence by the admitted fact that the ancien regime was marked by public institutions that were hollowing out from within, and an increasingly corrupt political practice that, while it achieved a measure of economic development and also social upliftment for hitherto depressed classes, was seen increasingly as extractive in its primary motivations, exploitative of the poor, and marked by a plutocratic elite, comprised dynastic or otherwise entitled politicians, crony capitalists and a deracinated English-speaking elite divorced from the country’s roots.

Cultural awakening and even assertion are inevitable in previously suppressed societies. But if the story-line is to be sustained, that a national effort informed by a rooted cultural awakening results in broad-based resurgence, finding reflection in more appropriate forms of governance and improved performance on every count, it must demonstrate that there is substance to the claims of improvement over what went before when it comes to the protection of basic rights, little or no high-level corruption in the new dispensation, equality before the law for everyone, the free functioning of autonomous institutions, economic performance along a new growth curve, a presence on the global stage that is buttressed by internal unity, and so on – delivered not by one individual but systemically by those committed to such a path.

It would help also to establish that the counterfactual does not operate. Absent such evidence, the new reality becomes nothing more than plain majoritarian assertion as an end in itself, justified purely on the assumption that ‘I now can’.

One test of such claims must be an acknowledgement of inconvenient truths, avoiding confusion between traditional myth and scientific knowledge – reflected in claims that organ transplant surgery, flying machines, the internet and other such contemporary wonders all existed in the India of or around the Vedic period. The further mixing up of wish and reality through the propagation of revisionist history (e.g. Maharana Pratap defeated Akbar’s forces at Haldighati), hostility to academics whose theories are not to the liking of cultural supremacists, and the conflation of exaggerated claims with the real record of government programmes – all of it comes in the way of perceiving the objective reality, without which there can be no real acquisition of knowledge, or for that matter any way forward.

 

In the end, any society’s greatness is subject to, among other things, a critical test: How does it treat its minorities and its disadvantaged? The same test is applied to other societies and countries: China when it comes to the Uyghurs, Myanmar vis-à-vis the Rohingyas, Turkey and its Kurds, African-Americans in the US, and Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Sardar Patel said in the Constituent Assembly that Hindus should treat Muslims as they would like to be treated if the boot were on the other foot. If the advocates of Hindutva wish to ignore such advice and imitate Aurangzeb rather than Akbar, seeking historical vengeance and a hard orthodoxy rather than inclusive syncretism, they will either be rejected by voters or find that the country goes down unscripted roads, as Pakistan’s descent testifies.