Why Modi Won And Could Win Again

Every now and then comes along a week that reminds me why Narendra Modi has become India’s prime minister twice and seems on his way to winning a third term. The week gone by is one of those weeks. I happened to travel to a Southeast Asian country that was as poor and disorderly as India when I first went there thirty years ago. It is now many, many years ahead of us. It does not matter which country because most southeastern countries have overtaken us in the quest to give all citizens a decent standard of living. This can be done with good governance and investment.

This time I returned after an absence of three years. And I drove into the countryside as I have done many times before and the changes I saw left me wonderstruck. I drove on a fine highway, past small towns and little villages that exhibited a degree of order, cleanliness, and planning that we in India still aspire desperately to. What struck me most was that nowhere did I see dirt or rotting garbage. It reminded me that until Narendra Modi started his Swachch Bharat campaign we did not have a single prime minister who noticed the squalid, filthy conditions in which most Indians are forced to live. Modi has not succeeded fully in making Bharat truly Swachch but he is at least trying.

The reason why we are decades behind most Southeast Asian countries is because of the criminally negligent governance that defined the Congress era. It would be more accurate to use the phrase the Prime Minister did to describe that time in his speech from the Red Fort on our 77th Independence Day, ‘rule of the family, by the family, for the family. This is exactly what it was, and ‘the family’ got away with it because in Lutyens’ Delhi they remained cocooned by courtiers and sycophants.

When I came back to India, I found that a publisher had sent me a book written by one of the most devoted members of Rajiv’s Durbar. No other than he who once declared that Modi would never become prime minister but since he was a’ chaiwallah’ he was free to come to Delhi and serve tea in Congress headquarters. It was a stupid, arrogant thing to say and it helped Modi win in 2014. If Modi had paid Mani Shankar Aiyer to say what he did he could not have done a better job.

My reason for reading this courtier’s memoir was personal. While glancing through it I noticed that he had said some very rude and untruthful things about me, so I read what else he had to say about the days when I knew him, and Rajiv was prime minister. It did not surprise me to find that his memoir about his time as Rajiv’s right-hand man is no more than an elaborate tissue of lies. From the vantage point of this devotee Rajiv made not a single mistake. He did not justify the pogrom that caused the death of more than 3,000 Sikhs in the first week of his becoming prime minister. He concedes that Rajiv made a speech in which he admitted that after the assassination of his mother there was terrible violence but when ‘a big tree falls, the earth shakes.” He absolves Rajiv on the grounds that the speech came long after the pogrom. So?

Shah Bano’s case and the law Rajiv’s government passed denying divorced Muslim women the right to maintenance was not his fault either. It was the fault of people around him. The Bofors scandal was also nothing to do with Rajiv but there could have been people in his circle who were bribed in this arms deal. There is no mention of Ottavio and Maria Quattrocchi in whose Swiss bank accounts Bofors bribe money was found thanks to some excellent investigative journalism by Chitra Subramaniam. If they were brought into his memoir, he would have to explain why Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi’s closest friends were bribed by Bofors. Quattrocchi was a fertilizer salesman not an arms dealer.

What truly appalled me was this courtier’s account of a trip to Kalahandi with Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi in 1987 when this district of Odhisha was in the grip of a terrible famine. Children were dying of hunger because they had lived on birdseed for more than six months. Women were selling their babies for as little as a hundred rupees out of desperation. I know because I traveled to the villages where these things were happening and when I returned to Delhi, I sent a list of villages to one of Rajiv’s senior ministers in the hope that if the prime minister visited them, his chief minister would offer more help than sending boxes of antibiotics.

Rajiv went to Kalahandi and his faithful memoirist went with him, but they did not go to the villages where there was famine. They stayed in safer territory where villagers were disappointed only because they did not catch a glimpse of Rajiv’s ‘udan khatola’. This famine was one of the worst stories I have ever covered because there is nothing worse than seeing children dying slowly of starvation.

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