dailyO
Politics

Where similarities between Modi and Nitish Kumar begin and end

Advertisement
Sankarshan Thakur
Sankarshan ThakurJul 31, 2017 | 15:26

Where similarities between Modi and Nitish Kumar begin and end

Truth to tell, Nitish Kumar and Narendra Modi can appear uncannily akin. Both were baptised in the political churn provoked by Indira Gandhi's authoritarianism of the mid-1970s and rose slowly up the ranks. Both are able administrators competing at the top of performance charts. Both like dominating the stage with presidential air in India's Westminster-mode parliamentary order; they are one-man acts, though Modi is by a fair distance more domineering and aggressive of demeanour.

Advertisement

As individuals, they have cannily managed to float above India's rather low watermark of financial integrity. Nitish makes a personal fetish of keeping his table clean. When he began the campaign for 2010, he decided he would not use chief ministerial vehicles for any of his outings.

Devesh Chandra Thakur, a genial and successful businessman and a minister in Nitish's first government, decided to gift him an SUV, souped up and especially bullet-proofed at a professional garage in Delhi. Nitish used it for the duration of the campaign. The day he assumed charge as chief minister for a second time, he sent the SUV back to Thakur's portico.

In a country where dynasty-building and political nepotism are no longer the preserve of the Nehru-Gandhis, both men have achieved credible insulation from family in public affairs. Both emerged from humble semi-rural moorings but neither is known to have abused success to patronise or promote kin.

But the differences between them are deep and critical.

Modi's politics are an unapologetic and often belligerent articulation of Hindu nationalism that scares India's 13 per cent Muslim minority and taunts existing notions of the Indian secular order. He will not accept the notion of religious minorities and therefore he also symbolises a new defiance of the precepts of the Indian Constitution.

Advertisement

He has refused to express regret for the killing of more than a thousand Muslims on his watch in the widespread reprisal rioting of 2002 that followed the burning down of a railway coach carrying Hindu pilgrims at Godhara railway station. Two years ago, he famously declined a skull cap offered to him by a Muslim cleric during an elaborately choreographed sadbhavana, or harmony, campaign.

Modi's majorityism comes married to a well-publicised image as doer-king whose governance objectives brook neither political barricading nor bureaucratic red tape. He has upscaled Gujarat's already prodigious reputation as a business hub, attracted India's wealthiest industry captains, and forced Western capitals to loosen their reservations on his controversial human rights record.

nitishbd_073117030844.jpg
Nitish Kumar foregrounds moderate and inclusive commitments on the political stage.

In the process, Modi has also been able to posit himself as a national alternative, striking a contrast to the corruption and policy-standstill that have bedevilled Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's ramshackle coalition.

Nitish, by contrast, foregrounds moderate and far more inclusive commitments on the political stage. He espouses the socio-economic rights not merely of India's religious minorities but also of scores of underprivileged class and caste groups that have struggled to get their share of India's development pie. His ideological gurus are Lohia and JP, both pro-subaltern, secular socialists.

Advertisement

India's rampant economic disparity is one of the things that makes Nitish question Modi's suitability — or even acceptability — to lead the country. Nitish says nothing new when he calls India an "extremely complex" undertaking, but he does begin to articulate an alternative viewpoint to Modi's when he harps on the challenges of poverty and underdevelopment in a nation many have hastily labelled an Asian superpower.

"Nobody can lead India that does not think of it as a very poor country, or feels for the poor masses," Nitish has often told me. "It is one thing to push growth in a traditionally prosperous pocket like Gujarat, quite another to grapple with the virtual absence of infrastructure and fundamental economic dignity for people. The Gujarat model is the model of corporate India, which is already in leap and wants more and more for itself. That cannot work for the vast majority of this country. I know we have a booming and selfseeking middle-class, but that is only a small part of India, it is not India. The BJP's hardline loyalist constituency on Facebook and Twitter is a PR effort that is actually dangerous to the discourse of India, it reflects an unfeeling fracture from reality." 

Gujarat, in fact, typifies to Nitish what's wrong with India's economic structure. Relatively better-off states are able to seduce heftier investment faster, the rest continue to fall away. Nitish's other, and more pressing, quarrel with Modi concerns their divergent social and political worldview. Modi seeks to end what he calls "minority (read Muslim) appeasement" and his politics often seem designed to succeed at their expense. Nitish is outspokenly for affording Muslims, and other religious minorities, political assurance and state assistance.

bb_073117030758.jpg
The Brothers Bihari, by Sankarshan Thakur; HarperCollins India; Rs 420.

As a community, Muslims have suffered most, and unspeakably, in recurrent bouts of sectarian violence in independent India. As a member of Parliament, Nitish opposed the communal whirl that eventually crashed into the medieval Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 and razed it. As chief minister, he fast-tracked long-overdue punishments to those guilty of anti-Muslim mayhem in Bhagalpur.

"There are commitments we cannot shy away from, we are a pluralist nation and all manner of minorities, not just religious but also economic, should be guaranteed special safety nets. Like elders, the majority bears a responsibility towards minorities... Any leader of India has to find acceptability among a wide cross section of people, else he or she is bound to fail what we understand to be the idea of India. I cannot work with anyone who poses a challenge to that idea, I will fight such a person, I will fight such an idea. It is not about retaining power or only about Bihar, it is about the kind of people we are, about the Indian ethos." 

But he faced new, daunting challenges all his own at home in Bihar. The gamble Nitish took back in June 2013 to break with the BJP was not contingent on the Congress or on new partners. It was a gamble pretty much his own to carry through.

He'd decided to be alone again, a single man on the rough side of the street, though a vagabond no more.

(Re-printed with the publisher's permission.)

Last updated: August 01, 2017 | 13:59
IN THIS STORY
Please log in
I agree with DailyO's privacy policy