Malevolent Republic

by K S Komireddi

  —Narendra Modi

  Narendra Modi did not stage a coup. He won in a free election. Unlike Indira Gandhi, he has exhibited a disciplined outward commitment to the norms of constitutional democracy while vandalising the organs that secure Indian democracy. It is certainly a miracle that institutions, battered for decades by Congress, have survived at all. Conceived to safeguard a pluralistic nationalism, and annealed in a climate of official adherence to secularism, they are, despite their defects, structurally inimical to the prime minister’s brand of majoritarianism. Unable precipitously to remake all of India, Modi sought programmatically to subordinate India’s institutional machinery to his political project. The poor health of the republic—political dysfunction, bottomless corruption scandals, collapse in trust—is what propelled him to power. And it is in the name of resuscitating the ailing republic that he has subverted and seized institutions indispensable to India’s existence as a secular democracy.

  India’s modern military, a product of the Indo-British encounter, has always been the republic’s most respected institution. It never intruded in civilian matters, and politicians never sought to exploit it for electoral advantage. Modi betrayed no qualms in stamping on this sacred covenant. On 19 September 2018, the University Grants Commission instructed the vice chancellors of public universities across India to celebrate 29 September—the second anniversary of the day on which Indian armed forces staged a heavily publicised raid into Pakistan-held Kashmir on Modi’s orders—as ‘Surgical Strikes Day’. Authorities were directed to hold parades, press students to write letters of support to the armed forces, ‘provide photo-ops for the students’, and then compile the photos and letters for the public relations division of the defence ministry ‘for publicity across various media’.1 Shortly after the ‘surgical strikes’, hoardings of Modi’s hirsute face, foregrounded against the silhouette of a lone soldier, went up in Uttar Pradesh.2

  In 1999, when freelancers in the Hindu-nationalist movement sought to milk the brief war between India and Pakistan with political posters bearing photos of the military chiefs, the head of the army at the time complained to the prime minister and the posters vanished.3 This time, ‘surgical strikes’ became a rallying cry in the BJP’s political campaigns in every state where an election was being held. The army itself was reduced to a prop. As Amit Shah told the press, the soldiers were merely giving militaristic expression to the prime minister’s ‘determination and political intent’.4 Religion, disavowed by the military, was injected into the propaganda built around its valour. One poster, for instance, showed Modi as the Hindu deity Rama and Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif as the ten-headed demon-king Ravana with the caption: ‘We need another surgical strike by Modi to end a Ravana-like Pakistan.’5 Many veterans were aghast at Modi’s appropriation of the armed forces.6 If the prime minister remained undaunted by criticism, it was because the Indian Army at the highest levels, infected by the chest-thumping nationalism exemplified by Modi, did not appear particularly discomfited.7

  An institution fabled for its neutrality now counts a minister in Modi’s government among its former chiefs—a man notorious for denouncing adversarial journalists as ‘presstitutes’. Retired officers routinely appear on pro-Modi television news networks and direct lurid threats at Pakistan. And in the days leading up to the ‘Surgical Strikes Day’ celebrations, no less a figure than the incumbent chief of the army staff, General Bipin Rawat, went on television and, echoing the BJP, spoke of the ‘need for another surgical strike’ against Pakistan.8 Such a belligerent remark, unthinkable not so long ago, would have invited a severe rebuke from the civilian authorities in the pre-Modi years. But Rawat, appointed to his role after Modi discarded the seniority principle by which top posts in the armed forces have traditionally been filled, went without being censured. Installed in office by Hindu nationalists at home, Rawat expressed the view that Pakistan should ‘develop as a secular state’.9 His exhortation, gratuitous, was also laden with irony: he got his own job by superseding a colleague—Mohamadali Hariz—who was poised to become the first Muslim chief of the Indian Army until India’s sectarian prime minister decided brazenly to depart from convention and appoint Rawat.10

  There was a time when senior officers of the Indian military remained largely out of the public’s view. They reported to their civilian bosses, confined themselves to the barracks, were always discreet and dignified in public, and never allowed themselves to be dragged into debates about Pakistan or China. In their professionalism, the defenders of India were almost a people apart. Modi, instead of preserving this culture, has thoroughly politicised the institution. Asked to account for his order of fighter jets from France, the prime minister accused his political opponents of having ‘humiliated’ the army.11 A man who did not rise to acknowledge the widow of a fallen soldier at the Republic Day parade had the gall to enjoin Indians a year later to ‘show respect to our defence forces’.12

  The armed forces, as it happens, have never needed anyone to whip up admiration for them: they enjoy it in abundance. Besides, the prime minister’s specious rhetoric can scarcely conceal the fact that not since Krishna Menon—Nehru’s disastrous defence minister during the Chinese invasion of 1962—has India known a leader more indifferent to the welfare of India’s service personnel than Modi. He places them in grave danger without a plan (as he did in Doklam), seeks disgracefully to profit at home from their sacrifices (as he did after the ‘surgical strikes’) and brags shamelessly about what a tough guy he is to audiences of diasporic Indians abroad (as he did at one of his embarrassing concerts in London).13 But other than arriving with camera crews on Hindu holidays to be filmed greeting troops amassed on borders, what has Modi done to improve the lives of soldiers and veterans? The day after the ‘surgical strikes’, as much of the Indian media was panegyrising Modi, the government quietly slashed the pensions of disabled veterans.14 Indian forces still carry ancient equipment. So abysmal is the state of affairs under Modi that, as the former Indian Army officer Ajai Shukla has written, ‘soldiers often choose to fight with Kalashnikov rifles taken from dead militants’.15

  India’s byzantine bureaucracy can always be counted on to provide an alibi for Modi’s failures. But no bureaucrat appears to have impeded Modi when he deployed the army in 2016 to lay down pontoon bridges at an environmentally sensitive site in Delhi for a private event hosted by a Hindu guru.16 It is difficult to imagine a more egregious insult to the men in uniform than to outsource them to a pro-government religious impresario as providers of menial labour. The precedent he has established by pulling India’s most venerable institution into the foetid political swamp he inhabits will become—has already become—the new norm. Attempting to reverse it will generate its own intractable problems. It will require the military to assert its independence; but can the military make such an assertion without appearing to defy civilian authority? And what happens when a politician who feels slighted by the khakis miscalibrates the counter-assertion of civilian authority and ends up unwittingly making the military feel belittled and demoralised? The wall which in the pre-Modi years separated the armed forces from politics hardened over long decades during which both sides (for the most part) unfailingly upheld in conduct and in speech the unwritten codes by which democracies survive. The consequences of Modi’s eroding of that wall for immediate political gain will haunt India long after he has exited the scene.

  The RBI, as one of its former governors correctly pointed out, ‘figures only after the army in terms of perception as a custodian of society’s trust’. How, then, did this esteemed institution, home to some of the country’s most distinguished brains, become party to Modi’s hare-brained decision in 2016 to void high-denomination notes? It is clear in retrospect that the bank’s autonomy—its capacity to mount resistance—was methodically abraded in the months preceding demonetisation. The chairman of the RBI at the time, Raghuram Rajan, a cosmopolitan alumnus of the IMF whose faith in capitalism is seasone
d with an appreciation for restraint and regulation, was subjected to vicious personal assaults by the BJP’s apparatchiks. In the summer of 2016, Subramanian Swamy, a Harvard-trained economist and BJP parliamentarian, notorious for his prescription to strip Muslims of their voting rights,17 urged Modi to sack Rajan and deport him ‘back to Chicago’—Rajan held an economics chair at the University of Chicago—because he was not ‘appropriate for the country’.18 An arresting figure, originally from Tamil Nadu, Rajan is the closest to a celebrity occupant his office has ever had. Columnists likened him to James Bond. A Singh appointee, he used his fame and position to propagate defences of India’s liberal traditions as saffron terror intensified across the country. There may in the future be a clamour by self-cherishing liberals to conscript Rajan into politics to play Manmohan II. But as things stood, Rajan became a bugbear for the BJP. Not only was he ideologically at odds with Modi (‘publicly disparaging of the BJP government’, in Swamy’s words). He was also competing with the prime minister for the headlines. This was an affront to Modi’s grandiosity. The silence of the prime minister—and the refusal of any cabinet minister or senior party functionary to issue even a perfunctory defence of the country’s senior-most banker as he was savaged by members of the ruling party—bespeaks the fact that the bruising of Rajan in May 2016 was the farthest thing from a rogue operation. Rajan, nearing the end of his term, announced his decision to retire from the RBI and return to academia. His subsequent revelation to the press that he had expressed grave reservations about demonetisation to the prime minister ‘in no uncertain times’ when the idea was put to him further clarifies the reasons behind the well-oiled campaign to maul him.19

  Rajan’s successor, Urjit Patel, an impressively educated economist of Gujarati descent from Kenya, had worked for the Modi-supporting Ambani family’s Reliance Industries and served as a director of Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation when Modi was Gujarat’s chief minister.20 He became a naturalised Indian citizen only in 2013, when he was appointed deputy chairman of RBI. Under Patel’s stewardship, the central bank not only remained mute about demonetisation—assuming the secretive idea hatched in the prime minister’s residence was run past it—but also allowed itself to be used to provide retrospective cover to the prime minister when chaos ensued. In November 2016, a senior member of Modi’s cabinet told parliament that the decision to demonetise had in fact been ‘taken by the RBI board’.21 The only way to verify this claim designed to exculpate Modi was to examine the minutes of the RBI’s board meeting. But the bank refused to disclose them. Even enquiries submitted under the Right to Information Act did not yield a meaningful answer. A submission by the RBI to a parliamentary panel obtained by the press revealed that the government notified RBI of its decision to ban currency notes only hours before it was announced.22

  Patel’s docile acquiescence, shredding the RBI’s credibility, emboldened Modi to make a push for its total subjugation. Lauded in 2014 by commentators who decried the welfare programmes of Congress as ‘bribes’ and ‘handouts’ for the votes of poor Indians, Modi announced a raft of exorbitantly expensive welfare schemes in 2018, fashioned specifically to lure poor voters. How was he going to pay for them? His needs, which arose as an afterthought as elections approached, were not going to be met by the portion of the ‘profits’—interest accrued on bonds—that the central bank transferred annually to the government. So Modi decided to make yet another unprecedented move: raid the RBI’s vast reserves of cash. The central bank, even from its position of shrunken autonomy, was alarmed. Expropriating those funds, retained by the RBI to provide stability in the event of unforeseen crises, would paralyse the bank in a time of genuine need.23 Modi was making a demand that no previous government—even in wartime—had made.

  Patel, having complied with Modi’s whims for too long, attempted belatedly to withstand political intrusion. His deputy fired a warning shot in an impassioned speech in Mumbai in October 2018, telling Indians that ‘the risks of undermining the central bank’s independence are potentially catastrophic’.24 The speech would have given pause to any responsible prime minister who placed the national interest above self-interest. But Modi, who values fealty above all else and is invested more than anything else in the perpetuation of himself and the entrenchment of his ideology, retaliated forcefully, packing the bank’s board with loyal bureaucrats and RSS ideologues, and threatening to invoke legal clauses that had never before been used, to compel the bank to turn over its reserves to the government.25 Besieged at lightning speed, Patel offered at first to make some concessions. Then, perhaps realising that he would forever be memorialised as the governor who presided over the total demise of the RBI’s independence, abruptly resigned from his job. Two successive resignations at the pinnacle of the RBI in two years is its own testament to the destruction of one of India’s most cherished institutions. Still, if any doubt remained, it was cleared up by the first major action by the RBI under Patel’s handpicked successor: a solemn pledge to transfer a gargantuan dividend to the government.26

  Some of India’s finest public universities are also strongholds of subaltern activism. They are places where young Indians from all corners of the country—many of them from disadvantaged backgrounds—meet, mingle with, and discover compatriots unlike themselves. The solidarity forged in these places transcends the narrow identities around which the BJP mobilises voters. It was inevitable that Modi was going to pounce on them. The intervention was indirect, delegated to the foot soldiers of the movement in the student wing of the RSS, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad. Backed and safeguarded by the powers that be, these thugs have acquired a chilling leverage on university campuses across the country. The blueprint for the takeover of universities, activated first at the University of Hyderabad in 2016, has, in the years since, hardened into a terrifying pattern sustained by the blessings of the government and the complicity of law-enforcement agencies.

  Members of the ABVP sniff the air each morning for fresh offence, trace the origin of the offence to a Dalit scholar or a Muslim student or a liberal or left-wing student organisation, accuse the offenders of propagating ‘anti-national’ ideas, and trigger unrest and agitation until the university, shivering with dread, takes punitive action. At Hyderabad University, it was a Dalit scholar named Rohith Vemula, a gifted writer dependent for survival on a government scholarship, who came into their crosshairs. That he was Dalit, an irredeemable sin in Hinduism, already made him an objectionable figure. But Rohith also had opinions, and expressed them forcefully when the ABVP disrupted the university with protests against the screening, at another university campus in faraway Delhi, of a film on sectarian riots that showed its masters in an unflattering light. Being reproved by an outcaste must have been particularly mortifying. So the ABVP drafted a letter to a minister in the Modi government accusing Rohith of being an ‘anti-national’. The minister, an immensely powerful man, forwarded the note to the university authorities. The authorities moved swiftly against Rohith. The scholarship of the bright, promising scholar, who idolised the prose of Carl Sagan and dreamt of emulating his hero in his own writings, was suspended.27 That meagre stipend was vital for him. But more than deprivation, Rohith appears to have been tormented by the violation of his dignity—the continuation of a primeval caste-Hindu sport. ‘Never was a man treated as a mind’ in India, Rohith wrote in a note. ‘As a glorious thing made up of stardust.’28 He killed himself. The outcry that erupted in the weeks that followed provoked no corrective action from Modi. The minister who intervened on behalf of the men who drove Rohith to end his life kept his job. It was Rohith who was posthumously maligned as an imposter, a caste Hindu who had been masquerading as a Dalit for easy handouts.29 After this early success, the ABVP, in line with the template trialled in Hyderabad, menaced campuses at the best-known institutions of higher education across India.

  At Delhi University’s Ramjas College—no one’s idea of a bastion of left-wing radicalism—hoodlums of the ABVP nearly
strangled to death a faculty member and roughed up students for the crime of organising a literary festival whose content the philistines found distastefully provocative.30 Official collusion became indisputably apparent when students at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University were charged in early 2019 with sedition—one of the gravest offences on the statute books—on the basis of allegations that they had chanted, almost three years earlier, ‘anti-national’ slogans at a meeting to protest the execution, under Manmohan Singh, of a Kashmiri man.31 One student, a Muslim, was ‘disappeared’; the police, busy abetting the foul men who rule India, have not been able to locate him. Some of the slogans heard at JNU were certainly repugnant. Indians who condone the republic’s sworn foreign adversaries and advance mitigations for those devoted religiously to the cause of the country’s territorial mutilation are not easy to warm to; yet the measure of a democracy’s self-belief is not only its capacity passively to tolerate speech that is objectionable but its determination actively to protect the speechmakers.

  The Modi government’s decision to invoke a statute from the nineteenth century—once used by the British to tame Mahatma Gandhi—to crush young students was worthy of a tinpot tyranny. At central universities from Delhi to Hyderabad, from Rajasthan to Bengal, students and staff have been terrorised for failing the test of nationalism devised by people pledging allegiance to the RSS, an organisation that once refused to recognise the Indian flag on the grounds that it was a totem of secularism.32 And the police, instead of hauling the emergent native avatar of Boko Haram to prisons, carted away their victims into custody. The rule of law hasn’t so much broken down as become inverted. The application of the official boot to the bodies of underprivileged students with a proclivity for dissent has been accompanied by the withdrawal of governmental support for their education: the Modi administration withheld more than Rs 50 billion earmarked for scholarships to students from disadvantaged communities.33 And the persecution of the talented but destitute students resisting Modi’s majoritarianism has itself occurred against the backdrop of a methodical desiccation of the handful of prestigious institutions that rear them.