Among the several episodes that tell us about the way New India is unfolding, two—related to Dr Upendra Kaul and Prof Romila Thapar—stand out. Under the authority of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), the National Investigation Agency (NIA) had sent a notice to Dr Kaul, demanding his presence at its headquarters.
Preposterously enough, it turned out that the NIA thought that a reference to ‘INR 2.3’ in an SMS exchange between the doctor and JKLF leader Yasin Malik referred to some hawala transaction. In reality, as the doctor explained to them, it was about a blood assay.
The NIA may have the authority to summon Dr Kaul, but surely, the clarification could have been gotten through a phone call or sending an investigator to his office. Dr Kaul is not an unknown man in New Delhi. He is India’s pioneer interventional cardiologist who taught and worked for more than a decade in AIIMS, and currently chairs the heart centre at a private hospital. He was neither an accused nor a suspect; there was no reason for the NIA to invoke the dreaded UAPA to demand his compliance.
Probably, there was another message in the summons: The good doctor has been a vocal critic of the Modi government’s decision to defenestrate Article 370 and demote Jammu & Kashmir’s status as a state of India. A prominent Kashmiri Pandit taking that position is clearly anathema to the government.
As for Prof Thapar (87), the demand that she send her CV for revaluation of her life-time appointment as Professor Emeritus of JNU, borders on the ridiculous. But it, too, is politically motivated. It is no secret that the Hindutva ideologues ruling the country have a profound distaste for the university, even though several of its leading lights are alumni. Given their fondness to conflate myth with history, they are not too happy with historians like Thapar who have international stature. Not surprisingly, last October, JNU appointed Rajiv Malhotra, accused of plagiarism and a self-appointed defender of Hindu culture in the US, as visiting honorary professor.
But this is only symptomatic of the banana republic that this country seems to have become with the spread of jahaliaat (ignorance) and incompetence in all sectors of life.
The signs are many. First, there are the tragicomic: the failure of the rifles to fire at the guard of honour during Jagannath Mishra’s funeral; a judge’s observations on War and Peace in Pune; the canal in Jharkhand that took 32 years to build and came apart in 24 hours; and a Union minister whose portfolio includes education and whose Indian pride claims border on fantasy.
But second, and worse, are the disastrous self-goals of the government of the day: the 2015 blockade on Nepal; demonetisation; the flawed GST rollout; draconian National Register of Citizens process; demotion and division of Jammu & Kashmir; and the raid on RBI’s reserves to replenish the government’s coffers. Union Home Minister Amit Shah has seen some of these as decisive acts of a government headed by a strong-willed Prime Minister. Maybe that is so, but the first three have already proved to be failures, just how the next two play out, remains to be seen.
In the meantime, India’s economy is slowly but steadily sinking. GDP growth has slowed to a six-year low of 5 per cent in the April-June quarter and is weak, no matter what spin you give. The problem is partly cyclical and partly structural and partly related to the global slowdown, so dealing with it requires sophistication and skill. Just how competently things are being run is evident from Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s steady rollback of her Budget measures, and the government’s seizure of the RBI’s reserves to make up for revenue.
Awareness of the need for reforms is actually the easy part. The problem is in getting a government capable of effectively executing them. The emerging crisis is not just about the global slowdown, lack of demand or the overhang of bad loans on the economy. It is actually about competence, both political and executive, of the Modi government.
Sure, Modi and Shah have proved that they know how to win elections. But whether or not they can run a country as huge and diverse as India remains a moot question. Instead of paying sustained attention to the longer term measures needed to put the Indian economy on the high growth path, they seem to get easily diverted into demonetisation, triple talaq, spats with Pakistan, roiling things in Jammu & Kashmir, and embarking on a global crusade against terrorism.
As for governance, all we get are slogans — Swachh Bharat, Plastic-Free India, Startup India, Bharat Mata Ki Jai and Jai Shri Ram. A national vision does not arise through the repetition of slogans. Neither, for that matter, does it come by vilifying the vision of predecessors, or a certain minority community.
Given the size of the country and the wretched conditions in which hundreds of millions exist in it, there can only be one priority goal for the nation—the transformation of the economic and social conditions of the people so that they can leave hunger, poverty and ignorance behind them.
India has missed several buses going that way. This decade was supposed to be the one where that decisive shift should have taken place. Instead, as we come to its end, we seem to be missing another one.
The Tribune September 3, 2019
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