The government said that the economy was a big problem, and it went to work immediately — on coiffing the national pride into a huge, unpleasing pouf. The PM boarded a plane and went from land to land hugging leaders, petting NRI communities, and flogging the fabulousness of India, despite having accused the UPA of turning it into a basket case. He was all about broadcasting national (Hindu) pride on the world stage with his personal panache (or narcissism, depending on how you felt about that gold-monogrammed suit). But he inaugurated his Jan Dhan Yojana, Beti Padhao Beti Bachao, and Make in India. He seemed to be going in the direction he had promised.
At home, however, the hydra-headed BJP-RSS combine hasn’t had a minute’s rest from shoring up the pride pouf with a shellac of “cultural values”. It airdropped RSS-approved Hindu nationalists into institutions, made a big fuss of Yoga Day, and refuses to censure communal remarks made by the likes of Yogi Adityanath, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, and Amit Shah. (Remember when the PM grabbed a broom for Swachh Bharat? That moment twinned development and purification in a visual metaphor that just slays.) Electorally, if the BJP scored in Jammu and Kashmir, it lost embarrassingly in Delhi.
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All this made supporters of the government, still optimistic about an economic miracle, justifiably a bit nervous.
Year two kicked off with unexpectedly robust resistance to all this national (Hindu) pride. Instead of appreciating Gajendra Chauhan’s guardianship of the cinematic national interest, the students of FTII went on a raucous strike demanding his resignation. It knocked the government off its smooth tracks. Barely had that fallen off the pages than India was rocked by the Dadri murder, triggered by rumours of beef in a fridge. That set off a series of cow-related atrocities and stupidities that wore the government’s modernising, development-oriented sheen awfully thin. Mr Modi’s silence on Dadri (and on the many openly regressive, communal, casteist, patriarchal statements made by extremist groups and representatives of his own party) utterly failed to lead — or led very well, depending on your politics. Following a long and bad-tempered public debate on tolerance, the BJP took its beef to the Bihar election, and ended 2015 with a bloody nose.
But if 2015 wasn’t plain sailing, it was nothing compared to the first half of 2016. The BJP’s clumsy responses to the attack on Pathankot and the Jat agitation in Haryana, jostled for space with a huge, ugly, truly bloody-minded reorientation of the national attitude to empowerment and education. Rohith Vemula’s suicide in Hyderabad, and the government’s frankly unbalanced response to student protests at Jawaharlal Nehru University, provoked a public screaming match about nationalism, anti-nationalism, and sedition. Ministers continue to talk about cows and deny marital rape, while unchecked Hindu groups are reportedly training and arming civilians, including children, to “defend” Hinduism. On the other hand, we now have those nice-looking Smart Cities and Digital India plans.
The Modi sarkar seems committed to streamlining systems and facilitating government communication, outreach and accessibility. Good organisational skills are what brought it to power, after all. It vigorously yearns to get things done economically, and political will counts for a lot. Its political domination seems assured for now.
But this majoritarian-minded government has shown that it does not understand privacy, individual rights, sexual choice, or real social pluralism. Having talked its way into power, it has equally excelled in the art of muteness, using both oratory and strategic silence to send out unseemly signals about nationalism, patriarchy, and majoritarianism. Overtly linking communal and gender crimes to questions of sentiment and honour, it has proven to be status quoist at best, and regressive at worst.
By wading into campus politics; by backing censorship; and by poking its nose into Indian bedrooms, it has failed miserably to adhere to the maxim of minimum government, maximum governance. (A wonderful example of its confusions is a tweet by Ravi Shankar Prasad that reads: “Now users must commit to use matrimonial sites only for that purpose without posting misleading information. #GoodGovernance”.) Its educational ideal is to create passive Hindutva factories; and its scientific temper is dismal, dismal ignorance often tipping into the ridiculous.
Mr Modi has three years more to marshal his troops and right their priorities, but those who voted for this government may yet find themselves going through the five stages of grief.