Ideas of India

Prasanna Mohanty's thought-provoking exploration of the contemporary political life highlights how the current regime has failed to uphold the political values nurtured over the past seven decades

Attack on the 'Idea of India': A Decade of Social, Political and Economic Strife

Author: Prasanna Mohanty

Publisher: Black Eagle Books

Price: Rs 899

This book makes a serious attempt to trace the nature of political-economic changes that have been introduced by the Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party-National Democratic (BJP-NDA) alliance in the last 10 years. The author identifies the “idea of India” as a vantage point to offer a methodically organised, factually substantiated and deeply engaging narrative. Divided in 12 chapters, the book makes three persuasive sets of findings.

First, the post-2014 regime has converted the “rule of law” into what the author calls “rule by law”. This crucial transformation is explored analytically to discuss the institutional failure of the legislature and the judiciary. The author stridently argues that the autonomy of institutions is intentionally disregarded to establish and consolidate political dominance.

The second set of claims revolves around the idea of governance. The book underlines a crucial difference between the stated principles of public policy and their actual political manifestations. That has been the reason much-publicised policy statements— “Sab ka Sath Sab ka Vikas”, “Minimum Government-Maximum Governance”, and “Cooperative Federalism” — turn out to be politically meaningless. The book argues that these claims function merely as populist media-friendly slogans to represent an inclusive, democratic image of the regime.

The third set of findings make this book very valuable. The author devotes three long chapters to understand the changing structural dynamics of the contemporary Indian economy. These chapters show how the recent economic changes have affected the lives of the most poor and marginalised communities in the last 10 years. These data-driven chapters offer us an insightful explanation to make sense of the emerging class-based economic fault lines.

This multifaceted factual assessment leads us to the main argument the book makes. The author asserts that the present regime has failed to uphold the political values that have been nurtured in the past seven decades. At the same time, the standard procedures of governance have been completely destabilised for evolving a highly centralised form of politics. In the final chapter of the book, a set of “ready-to-use solutions” are proposed to make the arguments more constructive and practically usable.

The author claims that policy-making should not follow the usual top-down arbitrary model. Instead, the formation of policy must include all stakeholders, especially professionals and experts. This proposal is expanded to make  a few achievable recommendations such as encouraging respect for dissent and criticism, wider decentralisation of polity and administration, reassessment of a few controversial economic policies, collection of relevant data and its wider public dissemination for informed national discussions, introduction of a formal employment policy, investment in human capital, democratic accountability of the bureaucracy, proactive judiciary and media, and an empowered citizenry.

This serious study encourages us to ask a few critical questions. First, is it appropriate to describe the Modi regime simply as a marked departure from the accepted norms of politics? Or is it an outcome of an ever-evolving crisis? Second, how to make sense of the successful blending of two interrelated political trajectories — neo-liberalism and radical Hindutva? Finally, what have been the reasons for the popularity and acceptability of the regime? What has made Hindutva the dominant narrative of politics in the past 10 years?

The book gives us the impression that the Modi regime deviates significantly from constitutional norms and the given imaginations of India as a nation. This impression is not entirely incorrect. It is true that the post-2014 Indian state has questioned the Nehruvian consensus in a significant way. However, this claim needs to be further historicised.

The Nehruvian consensus has two inseparable elements — state intervention in the economic sphere for achieving what Nehru himself called the socialistic pattern of society and an active politics of secularism and inclusion for the protection of minorities and other deprived sections of society. It is worth noting that the Congress-led Indian political class began to separate these two elements from each other in the early 1990s. Two significant events— the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the liberalisation of the Indian economy—helped the political class redefine the Nehruvian consensus in a restricted manner. Nehru’s all-inclusive economic vision was abandoned and he was eventually reduced to the value of secularism. The Congress regime under Narasimha Rao introduced a new sectoral approach to welfarism to address the needs of deprived sections while facilitating a market-driven economy at the same time.   

The Modi regime, in a way, is an outcome of this process. It wants to get rid of the Nehruvian consensus without deviating from the post-1991 political consensus in favour of unrestricted liberalisation.  This has not been a difficult task for the BJP. The entire political class, including the Congress, does not find the Nehruvian consensus electorally viable. This has helped the BJP establish its dominance. Although the author remains critical of the non-BJP parties, he does not envisage any direct political-intellectual connection between the Modi regime and its immediate predecessor. This analytical limitation also affects the flow of the main argument. The book does recognise the fact that welfare schemes have emerged as a powerful tool to garner popular support for the present regime, which openly adheres to neo-liberalism and Hindutva. Yet, there is no explanation of this specific form of state model.

These inconsistencies, however, should not be overstretched to underestimate the serious contribution of this thought-provoking exploration of the contemporary moment of our political life. 

The reviewer is associate professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi