Aakar Patel demolishes cult of Narendra Modi

It is nobody’s argument, including those enamoured of Modi, that he has developed a new theory of economics or of government. Then why this coinage? I know that Modi personally popularised his nickname and likes being called NaMo (in Gujarati, it is a command — ‘bow down’). Moditva and Modinomics follow the same theme, and likely have the master’s approval. The good thing about Moditva is that it is easy to understand, and expressed in short sentences.

Moditva 1 is: ‘Secularism means ‘India first’.’
Secularism is a constitutional obligation on the State. ‘India first’ is a slogan. Why should secularism interfere with national interest? It has no occasion to. This clever juxtaposing of two disparate things is a common theme in Moditva. Sometimes the result is embarrassingly banal, for instance Moditva 7: ‘Tourism unites, terrorism divides’.

Other times, it is misleading, as in Moditva 5: ‘Development politics over vote-bank politics’. This binary assumes that the two are opposites and that those who practise one never do the other. The fact is that the BJP in Gujarat is dominated by Patels. Four out of Modi’s nine Cabinet ministers for most of his three terms have been Patels, who are not even a sixth of the Gujarati population. Yet they get the ministries (if not quite the power as we shall see later) because of their caste. If that is not vote-bank politics, what is?

There are some instances of Moditva that need more careful observation. Moditva 2: ‘Minimum government, maximum governance’ sounds like good, old-fashioned conservatism. Who can argue against smaller government? Let’s see how Modi approached this. He personally held Gujarat’s ministries for home, industries, general administration, energy, petrochemicals, ports, mines and minerals, the giant irrigation project of Narmada and for Kalpasar, a massive project conceiving a dam across the Gulf of Khambhat. In short, all the ministries affecting Adani, Ambani, Tata, Essar and Torrent.

He ran all these with a deputy minister (Saurabh Patel) and team of bureaucrats bypassing other ministers and MLAs. When Modi says he has minimised government, he means on the elected side, not the bureaucracy, which is what small government usually means. And he has maximised himself, which presumably is the same thing as governance.

Some commandments have not been followed even in Gujarat. For instance, Moditva 10: ‘From a nation of snake charmers to mouse charmers’. Nicely put, but why do Gujaratis like Azim Premji and Ratan Tata need to go to Bangalore and elsewhere for their software businesses? What’s the problem with Surat, Ahmedabad and Baroda? I once asked Nandan Nilekani how much work Infosys had in Gujarat and he said it was nothing. The reason is not that there is no talent, but that Gujaratis have no English. Government schools cruelly deny the children of the poor access to the English alphabet till age 10, by which time it is too late, because of a rigid insistence on Gujarati-medium instruction.

I have clashed with BJP spokesmen over this on television often, and their defence is to obfuscate. This policy finally changed in a few schools this year, but a generation of Gujaratis has been refused access into the middle class under Modi. And Gujarat doesn’t have the urban, white collar opportunities in the services sector that other cities do.
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