Asking BJP to 'come clean' is Modi's way of controlling the narrative, not corruption

November 2016 would go down in the annals of Indian history as the month when "surgical strikes" were done with reckless abandon on the parliamentary procedures that are required to maintain a semblance of a functional democracy. Not only is the entire exercise of demonetisation - Prime Minister Narendra Modi's calling card for the coming Assembly elections, as well as perhaps for his entire tenure - resting on very thin ice as far as its legality is concerned, the new-day-new-rule fiasco has made the cash chaos a financial mayhem that's claimed over 70 lives already.

But could the interpreters of governmental maladies care any less? Exactly on a day when the flimsily named Taxation Laws (Second Amendment) Bill, 2016 - a money Bill to boot, itself a highly controversial issue - was literally bulldozed into passing in the Lok Sabha, thereby ensuring its House clearance altogether since it doesn't have to be debated in the Rajya Sabha at all, PM Modi issued a clarion call to all the BJP members to come clean on corruption.

Or did he?

PM Modi has asked the BJP members, particularly the MPs and MLAs, to declare their bank transactions undertaken during the period starting from November 8 till about December 31: in other words, the period during which demonetisation-induced cash crunch would officially be felt in and around the country.

The news channels are already declaring it as a big, bold move against corruption and the best example of the charity starts at home adage. However, there's a catch, and it's the fulcrum of this rather shambolic theatre of moral grandstanding. The ultimate arbitrator of this so-called self-purging exercise is none other than the BJP national president Amit Shah.

Seriously? So, BJP members will be disclosing their bank transactions - from declared accounts obviously, which are already technically white anyway - to the BJP president and not to an independent auditor? Are we to believe that Amit Shah's is going to be the last word on this questionable display of financial cleanliness? The same Shah who was asked by the Supreme Court to stay out of Gujarat when the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter investigations were underway?

And, even if Amit Shah's past weren't so, for the want of a better word, well, complicated, how does the prime minister justify an internal assessment of financial irregularities, if any, within the ruling party in the central government, by the party's national president himself? This exercise seems to be nothing but an extrapolation of the NaMo app survey, that announced with immense fanfare that 93 per cent of Indians (from a dodgy bunch of five lakh respondents) were "happy with demonetisation" and were willing to support the PM in his crusade against black money.

[Equally telling that India's biggest national daily, the Times of India, in its own online poll on demonetisation, had an overwhelming number of people, about 57 per cent, voting against it. Many of them branded it as a terribly implemented, ill-conceived and coercive exercise. But is there any hue and cry in the media as to why the TOI poll is not being talked about while the PM's app poll was widely accepted?] 

In other words, PM Modi wants us to believe that once Amit Shah says it's okay, BJP's trial by fire will be truly over. The visibly interesting characters within the BJP stable, such Eknath Khadse, Nitin Gadkari, BS Yeddyurappa, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Reddy brothers, will be reliant on Amit Shah's enviable scrutiny, as if they are not at the moment. This Swachh Bharat Abhiyan involving the known bank accounts of BJP MPs and MLAs is a gamble that is rigged to the last rupee.

But is that all? What's particularly interesting is the period for which the BJP members are expected to come clean as far as their bank transactions are concerned. It comes into effect - yes, like a writ, such is PM Modi's every word at present, and only he is allowed to go on the reverse gear, which he does pretty often - on November 8 and lasts until December 31.

Now let's ask ourselves just how is it that this overt display of monetary bravura actually a calculated move to win further and win hard the precious electoral brownie points? That's because a number of reports already point towards the huge possibility of the central government having tipped off its own party about the imminent currency withdrawal months in advance, thereby giving itself a sizeable window to turn the money/income/wealth in the shades tending towards black into shades relatively fairer.

Firstly, bang on November 8, hours into midnight, the time at which PM Modi's demonetisation diktat would come into effect, there was a staggering one-time deposit of Rs one crore in the West Bengal BJP account.

Secondly, as a number of reports now suggest, BJP invested heavily in buying land in Bihar  and Odisha in the months leading up to demonetisation. In addition, there was a yet unexplained two-year surge in the bank deposits  in September this year. BJP members were seen flaunting the unmissably pink Rs 2000 note even before it was announced to replace the now withdrawn Rs 1000 note.

Thus, after the ample warning, whatever little financial irregularity within the BJP stable that will be duly caught in the matchless ethical sieve that is Amit Shah's eyes, will be exorcised with great song and dance. It's but natural that this would become one more way to reestablish the ultimate Modi-Shah hold on the whole of BJP, wherein disgruntled murmurs and all-too-frequent accidental leaks are becoming the order of the day.

Whoever thinks that demonetisation would befall PM Modi and the BJP spontaneously continues to misread the prime minister. The purpose of this Tughlaqi exercise was to stamp the whole of India with the indelible ink of Brand Modi, and hardly all that stated and subsequently recalibrated to suit the shifting goalposts.

What PM Modi really wants to achieve – and some would say he already has – is to replace the gigantic financial mess that he has created by sucking 86 per cent of cash liquidity from the economy with a “moral economy” of a seemingly corruption-free nationalism. He wants to show that even the BJP MPs and MLAs are not free from the scourge of his spearheaded anti-corruption drive, which is how he wants to present and reap demonetisation in the days and months and years to come.

That demonetisation-induced austerity drive has “hit home” too, as it were, and that even the BJP members would just need to grin and bear it, declaring their bank transactions to the custodian of honesty that is Amit Shah (an extension of Modi’s own persona, the instrument of his ruling) – is the narrative that Modi wants to capture and propagate.

This moral economy of Narendra Modi’s perpetual surgical strike on the chosen enemy – whether it’s an external threat like Pakistan-sponsored terrorism or an internal issue such as black money – is what PM Modi wants every Indian to partake in, spontaneously. Even as parliamentary procedures are flouted with unprecedented recklessness, characteristic of the prime minister’s utter disdain for the foundational institution of Indian democracy, Modi wants his own version of moral universe to supplant what has sustained the country for 70 years now. This, despite the fact that the BJP (as well as the Congress) has stubbornly refused to come under the Right To Information Act, with the Modi-led Centre telling the Supreme Court last year that political parties cannot be under RTI. And this, despite reports that BJP is the highest gainer in the funding generated from undeclared sources, particularly as donations under Rs 20,000.

Modi's idea of a surgical strike on corruption is one big advertisement campaign and few shenanigans of the party members. That Modi is the BJP's own certifier of cleanliness, its own regulator of honesty, is not just pathologically naricissistic, to begin with, it is also, deeply extremely condescending of the existing legal and judicial system in the country. Without striking at the root of the political funding, and without allowing political parties, including the BJP, to come under RTI Act, Modi wants to appropriate the corruption narrative by bending Parliament itself. 

The passing of the Taxation Laws (Second Amendment) Bill, 2016 - much like the surreptitious passing of the Finance Bill, 2016 in the Lok Sabha earlier, in which FCRA for political parties was retrospectively allowed, to save both the BJP and the Congress for that matter – is a body blow to Parliament and how it ought to function. That Modi chose to order his house-cleaning diktat on the same day speaks volumes how a political staginess scripted from the first to the last word by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has replaced the democratic politics of independent India.

It’s equally sad that instead of resisting this narrative surrender to the prime minister for whom democracy is just a long electoral game, a gladiatorial match with endless tournaments in which he is both the rule and the player, influential sections of the media are busy being awestruck at one man’s ability to bend the story. Eminent journalists are tweeting how they “trust Modi to know what would strike a chord with the electorate, and bolster narrative of him as clean, willing to purge even internally”, all in the interest of so-called objective reportage.

But isn’t the media’s job to prevent the elected prime minister of the country from doing exactly that? Especially, when the media is acutely aware of the thickening smog of permanent deception through means all so various by which PM Modi is capturing and controlling the narrative? Especially when the media is the first witness to the regular and ever more draconian demolition of our cherished democratic, and many of the autonomous, institutions – such as Parliament, the Reserve Bank of India, universities, public sector units, and more – by this very regime.

If PM Modi is able to control and shape the narrative two and half years into his tenure, then it could only be with the complicity of the more than willing mainstream media to allow him to do precisely that. This is unpardonable. Because if we have been ushered into the post-fact/post-truth world, it’s due to the long and callous neglect of facts and truth by the custodians of reportage themselves.

What a pathetic surrender. 

Also read: Why we need to take the warning in Manmohan Singh's speech a bit more seriously

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