Intolerance: Why Modi faces a bigger challenge than Nixon-Bush
One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic. This Stalinesque line holds true for India today. For, never has the country witnessed such a concerted attempt by a select but powerful few to blatantly hijack the right to portray the entire nation as "intolerant" even when the facts suggest otherwise.
According to a recent home ministry data, there’s hardly any increase in the number of communal incidents this year as compared to 2014. In fact, it was in 2013, the last full year the previous UPA government was in power, that the country witnessed the most number of communal incidents — almost 30 per cent more than what has occurred this year — even if one adds up the current levels of violence to the remaining two months of the year for which the data is not available. But then, in 2013, India remained "tolerant" and authors/artists went about their tasks as if nothing had happened!
Why? It can’t be explained merely by casting aspersions on those joining the intolerant debate by disdainfully calling them Modi baiters. No doubt, there are quite a few with an inherent distaste, if not pathological hatred, for the prime minister, and this can be easily found out from their stand vis-à-vis Modi during or before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, but there's an equally significant number of people who don’t exactly carry such baggage. They genuinely believe that things have turned for the worse.
The answer can be found in the innate asymmetrical position the conservatives hold the world over. Niall Fergusson in his latest book, an erudite biography of Henry Kissinger, explains this phenomenon appositely when he reveals how the Nixon-Kissinger regime, often portrayed as an "evil empire", was actually better-off than each of the previous administrations which "could just as easily be accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity". He cites a study by the Brookings Institution to prove that “the United States used military action or threats of military action three times more often in the Kennedy years than in the Kissinger years”. And yet, writes Fergusson, “No great polemicist has troubled to indict Dean Rusk (secretary of state during the Kennedy years) as a war criminal”.
This bias against the conservatives continues till date. A new study has revealed that the Obama administration has carried out ten times more assassination drone strikes than the previous Bush regime, killing almost 2,500 people, of them at least 314 being civilians. In sharp contrast, the Bush administration saw the killing of 416 people, of whom 167 were civilians. Yet, the kind of visceral hatred reserved for George W Bush has hardly been applied to Obama.
The phenomenon, however, isn’t just confined to India or the US. In Britain, the Conservatives have for long been scoffed at as the “stupid party”, so much so that Margaret Thatcher, despite being the only reason why the UK is no longer "the sick man of Europe," was denied an honorary doctorate by the Oxford University’s governing assembly, which according to her biographer Jonathan Aitken “was an unprecedented snub to a serving prime minister” and the result of “donnish distaste for her politics”.
When the going gets tough for the likes of Kissinger, Thatcher or even Ronald Reagan, one of the most dynamic presidents in the US post World War II and yet often mocked for being "inspired" by John Wayne films rather than the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith, it would be credulous to think that Modi would find it easy to wade through these "liberal" waters.
So, what does he do? He can either wait hoping that things change on their own, or he would do what the eminents before him have done — challenge the status quo. One of the most questionable episodes of Thatcher’s first two years as prime minister was bending the rules on monopolies and mergers in order to allow media mogul Rupert Murdoch to purchase The Time and the Sunday Times.
For, she needed, especially in the initial years, the support of the media which was hostile to her.
Modi, however, has a bigger challenge: Unlike in the West, the Right in India is academically bankrupt and too closely associated with religion. Romila Thapar was spot on when she recently told this writer that the “Right-wing has failed to produce any good scholar”. What she didn’t say was it was largely the result of the pervasive intolerance of the "tolerant" vis-à-vis the "other" point of view, forcing it to either take refuge in foreign shores, as in the case of the likes of Jagdish Bhagwati, or be hijacked by the morons who believe that ancient Indians had pushpak vimans!