Creating, collecting, and sharing thoughts and ideas. And learning along the way.
DD’s leash is about 15 feet, though.
What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.
– Anatole France (1844-1924)
Dedicated to HS and ES.
As India enters its 2014 general election to constitute the 16th Lok Sabha, the spectacle of prominent commentators adjusting their views towards the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi unfolds before our eyes with escalating frequency and vivid clarity. These adjustments — to use a term that is more descriptive than judgmental, at least for starters — take a variety of forms, and come from a range of observers, analysts and experts.
Abdications of political judgment
We are told that Mr. Modi has changed his ways: to reassure likely allies and be able to lead a coalition government, he has transformed himself from an extreme Hindutva majoritarian to a right-of-centre moderate. We are told that Mr. Modi will not act in the future as he did in the past: he has left behind his persona of a parochial leader whose popularity was confined to Gujarat, and is in the process of becoming a statesman of national and indeed international stature. We are told that Mr. Modi is not what he was made out to be by his critics: he was never divisive, sectarian, authoritarian and violent; he has always been more interested in economic growth and infrastructure development than in religious politics and communal violence.
Further, we are told that all along, the liberal commentariat has been biased against Mr. Modi and intent on demonising him, mainly because it is habituated to flattering the Congress and the Left parties; sensible Muslims both inside and outside Gujarat who seek concrete economic opportunities over abstract secular values actually back Mr. Modi — as they must, being driven by pragmatism rather than sentimentality; and moreover there is no legally actionable proof that Mr. Modi or his administration planned, incited, encouraged, tolerated, enacted or helped mass violence against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, which left at least 1,000 dead and tens of thousands displaced. These being the new facts (“new” because they differ quite noticeably from what we were used to thinking of as the facts), many former sceptics have now become supporters of Mr. Modi and are not embarrassed to declare themselves in public.
These apparent adjustments of political opinion, I would suggest, are in fact stunning abdications of political judgment. Campaign rhetoric that is patently incendiary is being read as the discourse of moderation. Actions that are menacingly communal are being interpreted as harmlessly secular. Silence is being taken as proof of innocence. Denial is being projected as maturity. Claims about administrative efficiency, good governance and high growth rates — themselves empirically dubious — are being presented as satisfactory alibis and valid substitutes for a lack of concern for, not to say an outright threat to, the rights of minorities. The ecological costs of Mr. Modi’s preferred model of aggressive corporate investment are being papered over with unseemly haste. What is really at stake, as Dr. David Bromwich wrote in his brilliant essay of 2008, “Euphemism and American Violence,” is the truth of words and the reality of violence.
The language of Narendra Modi
In a recent exhibition of art at the Lalit Kala Akademi in Delhi, held to mark 25 years of the SAHMAT collective — named after the radical theatre activist, Safdar Hashmi, who was killed in 1989 at the age of 34 — there were many images that showed very clearly what this increasingly voluble language of equivocation, compromise, euphemism, complicity and propaganda tries so hard to hide. The sickening, brutal arson, rape, murder and displacement in Gujarat during the riots of 2002. Gutted homes, traumatised survivors. Ahmedabad charred and disfigured, as documented not only by countless photographs, but also recorded and mourned in paintings, sculptures and poems. Gulbarg Society and Naroda Patiya, scars on our collective conscience that would be slow to heal — and that cannot even begin to heal without some gesture of acknowledgement, howsoever oblique, a tacit ownership of responsibility, an apology, be it belated and muted, from Mr. Modi and his lieutenants who were ruling Gujarat at that time. If such a heinous pogrom could happen once under Mr. Modi’s watch, what guarantee is there that it will not happen again? How can we trust that justice will be done, when no one is willing to own up to what happened?
Images can reveal what words try to conceal. But the most reliable guide to what Mr. Modi really stands for and promises, is his own language. This language is saturated with Hindu piety, religious chauvinism, contempt for Muslims, and the fears and fantasies of Hindutva nationalism. This is a man who equated Muslims killed in 2002 with a puppy run over by a car. Whose popular campaign slogans are “Har Har Modi” and “Namo NaMo.” Who said that rhinoceroses are being hunted in Assam to clear space for illegal Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants. Who referred to Rahul Gandhi as “Shehzada” and Sonia Gandhi as “Sultana” — using Persianate terms in Urdu for royalty to designate, at one go, the dynastic nature of the Nehru-Gandhi family as well as the “foreign” origins of its most prominent members. Who dismissed genocidal violence against Muslims as the “reaction” of the “action” that consisted of the Godhra train fire in which 59 Hindu kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya were killed in February 2002 — the infamous kriya-pratikriya remark.
This is the man who parsed being a Hindu Nationalist as “I am a Hindu and I am a nationalist.” Who glossed “true government” as dharma, the Constitution as a “Holy Book” and public service as puja (i.e., worship, in the religious sense). Who characterised relief camps for displaced 2002 survivors — most of them Muslim — as “baby-making factories.” These are examples of phrases not including his innumerable personal insults and digs at rival politicians, notably Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (whom Mr. Modi called “Maun Mohan Singh,” thereby deriding his silence in various corruption scandals that surfaced during his tenure as Prime Minister), and Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal (whom he called “AK49” — alluding to the 49 days of his Chief Ministership of Delhi from December 2013 to February 2014, and simultaneously to the AK47 rifle used most often in Kashmir’s separatist militancy for the past 25 years, thereby implying that Mr. Kejriwal is an anti-India insurgent of sorts).
The alarming love of euphemism
Many times it is not Mr. Modi himself but his henchmen, admirers and self-appointed spokespersons, who speak in terms of revenge rather than reconciliation, of invasion versus indigenousness, when talking about Muslims and Hindus. They say we have to choose secularism or growth, as though there were something at all obvious or logical in presenting the nation with this sort of absurd choice, between a cornerstone of our political beliefs and a desideratum of our economic agenda. They say we have to count how many prominent Muslims are joining the BJP, as though the opportunism of a handful of elites is any indication of the options that are or are not available to millions of disenfranchised members of a beleaguered minority. They say Mr. Modi has learned respect and moderation, as though pretence, affectation and mendacity during election-time are simply unheard of tricks that we would never expect from our politicians when they go out seeking votes. They say Mr. Modi is clean, as though his apparent lack of fiscal corruption offsets other, very serious shortfalls in the values of toleration, inclusion and pluralism that are foundational to our democratic culture.
Do we really want to forget, ignore, misrepresent or deliberately misunderstand these and many other highly inflammatory words of Mr. Modi and his coterie? Should we be a party to what Dr. Bromwich called the “euphemistic contract” between the Modi camp and some sections of the media as well as influential opinion-makers? Do we want to fall prey to the Lady Macbeth syndrome, washing and washing those bloodstained hands so as to give over the reins of power to them in coming weeks? In the American context, discussing President George W. Bush’s “war on terror” after 9/11, Dr. Bromwich wrote: “Democracy exists in continuous complicity with euphemism.” Indian democracy too, and especially its most vocal proponents, the liberal intelligentsia, seem to have developed an alarming love of euphemism that is taking our polity further and further away from both moral responsibility and political judgment. It’s time to call a spade a spade, before it’s too late.
(Ananya Vajpeyi is the author of Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India, Harvard 2012. E-mail: vajpeyi@csds.in)
Daffodils by William Wordsworth
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed–and gazed–but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
There’s a new flag over my front door!
The world’s largest democracy begins voting on Monday, pitting the favourite Narendra Modi against Rahul Gandhi, scion of India’s most famous political dynasty. Here, we look at how the election works, which minor players may upset the frontrunners, and what the various outcomes might be
India’s general election, which starts on 7 April, will be the largest vote ever held. About 814,500,000 people will have a ballot, and around 20% of these will be eligible for the first time. Turnout has traditionally been in the region of 55%.
So vast is the democratic exercise that it will require around 5 million people to conduct the procedure, and as many again to police it. The electoral commission has a stated ambition that no voter should have to travel more than 2km to a polling station, and nor should any one station serve more than 1,500 voters.
The election takes place in nine phases, over a period of six weeks. Voting starts in the remote hills and valleys of the far north-east before moving into central upland areas and then broadly shifting further west and south.
Some of the medium-sized states hold polls in all constituencies on the same day, but the bigger states like Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh are spread over five or more days. Jammu and Kashmir, with six constituencies in total, takes five separate days, to allow the security forces to concentrate their efforts on one constituency at a time.
Day 1 | 7 April | 6 constituencies Some seats in Assam and Tripura in the north-east.
Day 2 | 9 April | 7 constituencies All of Arunachal Pradesh in the Himalayas, plus the other north-eastern states Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland and half of neighbouring Manipur.
Day 3 | 10 April | 92 constituencies All of Chandigarh, Delhi, Kerala, and Haryana, plus seats in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh, and the two seats in the island groups of Andaman, Nicobar and Lakshadweep.
Day 4 | 12 April | 7 constituencies North-east again – more in Assam, plus all of Sikkim and the rest of Tripura – and Goa’s two seats
Day 5 | 17 April | 121 constituencies The biggest day. All of Karnataka in the south, plus the rest of Odisha. Most of Rajasthan and seats in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jammu & Kashmir, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, plus remaining seat in Manipur.
Day 6 | 24 April | 117 constituencies The second biggest day. All of Tamil Nadu, and seats in Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, plus the rest of Assam, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and the single seat in Pondicherry.
Day 7 | 30 April | 89 constituencies All of Modi’s powerbase state of Gujarat, plus all of Punjab, a large part of Andhra Pradesh, and more seats in Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, and the two seats in Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and Daman and Diu.
Day 8 | 7 May | 64 constituencies The rest of Andhra Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir, all of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, and 15 seats in Uttar Pradesh, plus more in Bihar and West Bengal.
Day 9 | 12 May | 41 constituencies Not an anticlimax. The biggest day in two of the most populous states: West Bengal, with its remaining 17 seats voting, and Uttar Pradesh with 18, along with the last seats in Bihar.
All of this activity is to return the 543 elected members of the Lok Sabha, India’s more powerful lower house. Each MP serves a geographical constituency, and is elected using the first past the post system. The size of the constituencies varies substantially, partly because some of the seats are reserved for “scheduled castes” or “scheduled tribes”. The Lok Sabha also has two seats reserved for the Anglo-Indian community; the holders of these seats are appointed by the president.
Congress, which has led a coalition government since 2004, is the equivalent of the Grand Old Party of India, having been in power for all but 13 of the 67 years since independence. But hit by a faltering economy, corruption scandals and runaway inflation, Congress is now at a low ebb.
Together the coalition and its non-allied supporters had 276 seats, or a majority of nine. There is no guarantee that its coalition partners will work with it after the poll. Nor that its key “vote banks” – Muslims and those at the bottom of the caste system, India’s tenacious social hierarchy – will provide the numbers needed for a third term.
The BJP, meanwhile, is seen as the party of the urban middle classes, increasingly numerous as Indians move from the countryside to the cities, and as they become more prosperous. Some analysts describe the battle as pitting older ideas of class or community against new mass aspirations; others see battles between different ideas of India; still more talk of the regions. As ever in India, nothing is simple.
But after two terms in power since 2004, Congress’s current hold on the Lok Sabha is tenuous. They rule in coalition with several minor parties, including the Muslim League, but with the non-allied support of two major parties, the Samajwadi and Bahujan Samaj party. Both of those are rivals to Congress among the rural population of the Indus-Ganges plain, its heartland. Together the Congress coalition and its non-allied supporters had 276 seats, or a majority of nine. There is no guarantee that its coalition partners will work with it after the poll.
The BJP, meanwhile, is seen as the party of the urban middle class, a group that has grown as Indians move from the countryside to the cities, and as the cities become more prosperous.
Modi makes no secret of his desire for power, or his Hindu nationalist views, and is seen as divisive by some. From a poor family, of a caste at the bottom of India’s tenacious social hierarchy, he was born, almost literally, on the wrong side of the tracks and helped his father sell tea as a child to train passengers stopping at the station in his provincial hometown in the western state of Gujarat. He was an unexceptional student at his government school, though opinionated and rebellious.
Part of the RSS, the huge conservative national volunteer force, by his early teens, Modi showed himself to be an effective organiser and rose quickly in the movement. He moved across to the BJP, an ideological offshoot of the RSS though organisationally distinct, and worked his way up the ranks of the political party. In 2001 he was tapped to replace the then BJP chief minister, the top elected official, of Gujarat. He went on to win three successive elections before being launched on the national stage as the BJP prime ministerial candidate last year.
Critics see him as an extremist who, in 2002, allegedly allowed or encouraged mobs to attack Muslims in towns across Gujarat after a lethal fire supposedly started by Muslims on a train full of Hindu pilgrims.
Modi denied the allegations and investigators have cleared him of any direct involvement in the violence, but his reputation still concerns many, particularly among India’s large Muslim population.
Others, including some of the most powerful industrialists in India, say Modi is an honest and decisive administrator who has introduced policies that have encouraged development in his state and could be reproduced across the nation if he were prime minister.
Rahul Gandhi’s great-grandfather was Jawaharlal Nehru, the independence leader and India’s first prime minister; his grandmother was Indira Gandhi, a four-term prime minister, and his father Rajiv was assassinated while seeking re-election in 1991. His mother, Italian-born Sonia, is chair of the ruling coalition and president of the Congress party.
But what is less clear is the ability of the largely untested Gandhi to govern a chaotic country of 1.2 billion people that faces great challenges. He has no ministerial experience, nor any at state level.
Gandhi grew up in great privilege and was tutored at home with his sister Priyanka. He studied at Harvard and Cambridge, earning a masters in Development Studies, and worked for a short time as a management consultant.
He entered politics in 2004, the year the Congress party returned to power, and was elected to the parliamentary seat of Amethi, a family bastion once held by his father. In 2007 he was appointed to several senior positions within the party and launched a series of internal reforms designed to make the organisation more transparent, meritocratic and democratic. Last year he was made vice president – junior only to his mother – and has led the campaign in the 2014 elections despite not having been formally declared as a prime ministerial candidate.
Gandhi, who is unmarried, is reclusive and rarely speaks to the media. In a rare recent interview, he said he had never sought power and opposed dynasty in politics. He wants to empower women in India and young people, as well as make India “the centre of manufacturing in the world”.
Kejriwal first gained public attention during the India-wide agitation against corruption three years ago. He founded his political party, the Aam Admi (Common Man) party or AAP in the wake of that campaign, with a basic aim of fighting graft, bringing better governance and cleaning up the murky and opaque world of Indian politics. Last year the AAP surprised observers and won enough seats in Delhi to briefly hold power.
Critics said Kejriwal’s tenure as chief minister of the capital proved that, though a highly effective mobiliser and protester, the qualified engineer was less successful as an administrator and temperamentally unsuited to making the many compromises necessary to run a country as complicated as India. They also attacked measures such as increasing subsidies of water supply as populist.
Supporters simply said that, unlike most other local politicians, Kejriwal was committed to principles, not simply power, and maintained that gestures such as refusing the security cover, luxury accommodation and red vehicle siren that top Indian bureaucrats, military officers and politicians force traffic aside sent a powerful message.
Married with two children, Kejriwal is the son of a minor bureaucrat who grew up in smalltown northern India. He appeals to many Indians of a similar background frustrated by the failure of the state to provide basic services such as education, security and power. However, if on issues such as campaign funding Kejriwal’s stance is clear, his exact economic or social policies are less so. Most seem far from a clean break with the statist model that has dominated for so long.
Kejriwal passed some of India’s toughest public examinations as a young man. Now he is standing for election from Varanasi, the Hindu holy city, against Narendra Modi, the BJP prime ministerial candidate. Supporters say this is a gauge of his courage. Critics say it shows his hubris.
In Uttar Pradesh, the state which sends most MPs to parliament, the Samajwadi and Bahujan Samaj parties are both relatively weak but could still have a role to play. Elsewhere, West Bengal is the powerbase of the Trinamool Congress, led by the fiesty Mamata Banerjee, and, in southern Tamil Nadu, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam of Jayalalithaa Jayaram.
Both could end up as kingmakers. Shiv Sena are close BJP allies in Mumbai. The Communists look set to be reduced to a record low. As for the new Aam Admi party, no one really knows.
India’s election is far from a two-horse race. Taking the 2009 results of the six most populous states – together accounting for over half of the Lok Sabha – we can see different battles everywhere with much local variation. The toughest fights for the main two parties will be in Uttar Pradesh, Andhara Pradesh, Bihar and Maharashtra. Congress should do well in Karnataka, relative to the predicted debacle elsewhere.
Not surprisingly for such a mammoth exercise in democracy, the electoral maths is tricky to compute, with so many different races in different regions and a psephological map that is anything but uniform. But modelling a generalised swing to the BJP, taking votes proportionally from the other parties, we see that Modi’s party would overtake Congress relatively quickly, but struggle to get anything like an overall majority.
What happens next then depends greatly on what deals can be cut with coalition partners.
Not surprisingly for such a mammoth exercise in democracy, the electoral maths is tricky to compute, with so many different races in different regions and a psephological map that is anything but uniform. But modelling a generalised swing to the BJP, taking votes proportionally from the other parties, we see that Modi’s party would overtake Congress relatively quickly, but struggle to get anything like an overall majority. What happens next depends greatly on what deals can be cut with coalition partners.
Much will probably depend on inter-party horsetrading once the polls are done. But what are the possible outcomes for India’s government? Analysts predict six broad variants.
You can follow the Guardian’s latest coverage of the Indian election here.
Man on unicycle on the campus of the University of Michigan.
