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What Mr Modi forgets in his desperation to do good

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Omair Ahmad
Omair AhmadNov 10, 2015 | 16:34

What Mr Modi forgets in his desperation to do good

The recent Bihar elections have been remarkable not just for their length, but also the anxiety they have generated among many quarters. Other than the fact that the RJD-JD(U)-INC Mahagatbandhan won, and the BJP-led NDA lost, it also seems that concepts like caste, secularism, tolerance, corruption, and many others were in the fray - not to mention the poor cows. Now that the dust has cleared, many spokespeople for the BJP are now saying that the main plank of the party was development, and that was sadly obscured in the whole brouhaha.

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This is untrue. This election, like much of the politics we have seen in the last year and a half, has been not just about development, a "particular style of development", and the results of this election will determine whether this style will succeed or not.

The legacy of Lee Kuan Yew

Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, who died in March this year, was arguably one of the most successful politicians of the last generation. During the time he served as the prime minister of Singapore - from 1959 to 1990 - Singapore went from being a developing country to one of the countries with the highest per capita incomes in the world. And yet Lee's real success may have lain outside Singapore - in China. Breaking from its Maoist past, China's Communist Party (CCP) turned to Singapore for an example of a country that had transformed itself. Deng Xiaoping was the first leader to seek out Lee Kuan Yew, but over the years Lee visited China more than thirty times and spoke with every single Chinese leader worth consulting, including the current Xi Jinping, the current head of the CCP and the President of the People's Republic of China.

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Lee's prescription for Singapore, one which was copied faithfully in the Special Economic Zones set up in Deng's China, focussed on three key issues: (i) the ability to freely take over and allocate land; (ii) inject large amounts of capital to develop infrastructure; and (iii) complete limitation on any legal means to challenge the use of land and allocation of investment. Of course, this had a certain cost when it came to civil liberties. Lee (in)famously promoted the "Asian model" of governance, in which Western ideas of liberal democracy were completely antithetical to "stability" and "growth". In April 2013, the CCP circulated a communique to its members, often referred to as "Document 9". This communique stressed once again that universal principles, liberal democracy, investigative journalism, or assessing history outside of the paradigm set by the CCP, are all a danger to the nation.

Modi's promises

If Document 9's main points sound very similar to the position taken by the RSS and its numerous outgrowths, then Mr Modi's key promises after winning the elections echoed Lee Kuan Yew's dictates. A prime minister in a parliamentary democracy is best judged by the Bills that he or she tries to enact. Mr Modi's three prestigious Bills have been the ones pushing through changes on land acquisition, the control of the judiciary, and the implementation of the goods and services tax. In other words, the legislation was designed to allow the easy acquisition of land for corporate enterprises, to make sure that legal challenges would be minimised with a judiciary appointed with clear directives by the political system (in which a bureaucrat would have the biggest say) and that a streamlined services tax would allow businesses to trade easily across the many states in India.

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This is the dream that Mr Modi has been pushing across the world. I was in Germany after the Hanover festival, where Mr Modi unveiled his great "Make in India" initiative. A senior bureaucrat in the German government told me of the meeting between Mr Modi and Angela Merkel. While Dr Manmohan Singh and Ms Merkel understood each other almost instinctively, Mr Modi had a somewhat more difficult time as it was his demand that that Germany send its business to India. The German chancellor spent some time trying to explain that she could neither order the (very independent-minded) German states nor German industry to invest. It would be their decision. Nevertheless, the official said, there was this deep desire to find "another China", as business in China was becoming more difficult to do, and India was the ideal place for the world to invest, if it managed to get its policies right.

Failures in Parliament, desperation in Bihar

Unfortunately for Mr Modi, his key Bills have been stymied in Parliament; halted in the Rajya Sabha, where the BJP and its allies do not have a majority. Despite the fact that the Congress was the one that proposed the original National Judicial Accountability Commission Bill and the Goods and Services Tax, the BJP's arrogance and mismanagement has meant that Parliament has become even more dysfunctional than when the BJP was blocking its functioning under the UPA II. And if Parliament has been closed for business, how can Mr Modi convince the world that India is open for the same? It is no wonder that for all the promises of a $100 billion dollars of investment, India has received less than three per cent of the amount.

On top of this, Mr Modi's style of development meant that agriculture was neglected, a terrible mistake considering how agriculture has already been uncared for over the last three decades. Two bad monsoons, year upon year, were just bad luck, but it has driven crop prices higher than expected, with both small consumers and farmers driven to the brink.

We must see the shrillness of the Bihar campaign in this context. Talking of intolerance or bigotry of the BJP functionaries misses the symptoms for the root causes. The truth is that the BJP is now desperate to prove its performance, and it can only implement the dramatic changes it has promised by making sure it captures enough of the Rajya Sabha to do so. It is, therefore, willing to do everything, good, bad or ugly, to make this happen.

Talk development, please

As we roll towards another round of state elections, this desperation will not go away, nor the dirty tricks that this desperation brings out. It is, though, important to understand that the economic growth that the BJP wants to achieve is not a bad thing. Poverty remains the single worst thing that tens of millions of Indians experience. It destroys life chances, destroys options for education, for health, for a dignified life. It leaves young children and women vulnerable to all sorts of exploitation. In the words of George Bernard Shaw, "The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty". It is no sin to want it gone.

But if we need to address this sin, this crime, we need to discuss it honestly.

Mr Modi and his supporters believe that only a strategy similar to Lee Kuan Yew's and Deng Xiaoping's will allow us to deal with our problems. His opponents have to address that point, to show why this strategy will not work in India, and if they have a better strategy to make sure that India's population is not locked into the misery and poverty that they have been living in for far too long. Either that, or we can continue to abuse and attack each other until the cows come home.

Let's talk development instead. Please.

Last updated: November 11, 2015 | 13:30
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