Wanted: An opponent for Mr. Narendra Modi
- In Politics
- 07:54 PM, Apr 04, 2016
- Aadit Kapadia
Every political analyst worth his salt in India, irrespective of whichever side of the political spectrum he stands on, will tell you that the 2014 Lok Sabha election was a game changer in many ways. It rewrote the electoral rules in India. For the first time you had a quasi-presidential election, and the main opposition party BJP which had never crossed 182, crossed the magic figure of 272 by itself and formed the government. The Congress which had never dropped below 114 dropped to 44 and was resoundingly defeated.
It has been two years since that historic election, and Narendra Modi’s political capital, although it has dipped slightly, remains quite intact. He does not face any political challenge nationally in the near future, although he has had to contend with strong state leaders which have led the BJP to make a few changes to its electoral strategy. The absence of a challenger has led to a vacuum in the opposition at the top and a curious strategy has manifested itself in the last 2 years.
It is an open secret that the national media, especially the English language media, was hostile to Narendra Modi. Many intellectuals gloriously predicting before 2014 about him not becoming the PM, saw their claims fall flat. With no opposition in sight, and the PM’s personal popularity still being we saw a new script being written in the TV studios and amongst the intellectuals of India. There were individuals propped by the media in Delhi as potential ‘challengers’, some to the PM himself, some to the system that he had created in his previous avatar and so forth.
Last September we had a new phenomenon ushered into the TV studios by the name of Hardik Patel leading a movement for reservations for Patels. I had written about this and what it would lead to here https://www.myind.net/gujarat-beyond-hardik-patel. Somehow many of the commentators who did not have a clue about Gujarat politics were expounding their wisdom saying that this was the ‘Gujarat model on fire’, ‘he was the next big thing’ and covering it with many more such epithets. The movement fizzled out soon after as the column had predicted and another ‘David’ taking on a supposed ‘Goliath’ beat the dust.
After this game another phenomenon called Kanhaiya Kumar. A lot has been written about the case and what happened at JNU, and everything is in the public domain so I won’t go into the details of the specific case. What surprised me was the way he was being portrayed as the next best thing to happen to the opposition in India to take on the ‘might’ of the government. Some even hailed him as a revolutionary and had effusive praises for him without knowing his previous record, shenanigans or views. After certain revelations many of them beat a hasty retreat and predictably started contextualizing their arguments.
It is more evident that it was ever before that Kanhaiya Kumar is nothing but a repackaged version of the Communist Party of India. He represents an ideology so dated that even the countries that the party idolizes have junked that ideology long ago. In this desperation to find the next opponent to the Prime Minister, there is a dangerous trend developing. Rather than questioning some of Kanhaiya’s statements, positions taken on Naxalites and more, the media was busy promoting as the ideas of a ‘new India’. What sections of the JNU think do not represent the youth of India. Time and again, we have seen ‘icons’ created by the sections of the leftist media having their ideas rebranded as innovative solutions and paraded before us.
No communist leader or student leader is ever questioned on the failures of the communist ideology almost everywhere it has been applied. The decline of West Bengal is a thing of the past for them, the failure of USSR is an aberration and other countries are just to be ignored. In their haste to prop up the next opponent to the Prime Minister, these questions aren’t ever asked. Sitaram Yechury and Kanhaiya Kumar anyways in classic leftist traditions will tell you about the problems but will never give you the solutions. They will never say how India’s path towards crass populism created these problems in the first place. After all these years and repeated failures you still see a yearning in sections of the media and intellentigsia towards mainstreaming of these ideas.
Rahul Gandhi is passé. Any kid or voter on the street will probably tell you that, and even some Congressmen privately admit to it. However, we are still treated to the spectacle of his ‘comeback’ whenever he speaks a few lines in the parliament or anywhere else in a rally. The time between his comebacks is when the new opponents are created and new challengers to challenge the status quo are propped up.
Every democracy needs an opposition to keep the government in check, and no one has issues with the opposition raising legitimate questions and cornering the government if it has failed. But this desperation to prop up any leader against the government even if their ideas are outdated, failed and at times dangerous is a chilling recent trend that we have been observing. Neither is this good for democracy or our political space, if this is the trend that we are going to be seeing in the near future. The story of David vs Goliath is a tempting one to have played out in the Indian political arena. But when people try to play it by creating fault lines and pushing through ideas detrimental to the progress of the country, the consequences may be too severe.
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