Aakar Patel
The American journalist Bob Woodward (famous for his reporting of the Watergate scandal) has been documenting US presidents since Bill Clinton. Meaning that he has been writing books about their terms and events within, a sort of history as it unfolds in real-time. Our Rajdeep Sardesai has done something similar with the last three Lok Sabhas. He has reported on and written books about the 2014 and 2019 elections and is now out with a volume titled ‘2024: The election that surprised India’.
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Naturally, the book is about the campaign but it also takes us through the time leading up to it. There is a chapter on the COVID pandemic and the incompetence with which it was managed (now of course long forgotten). And another on the farmers’ protest and perhaps the decline of the Modi government can be traced to that period beginning with the Shaheen Bagh movement in late 2019 and peaking at the moment he belatedly surrendered to the farmers in late 2021.
That brings me to the most interesting part of the book, towards the end, where Sardesai answers what he calls frequently asked questions. There are three of them, the first being: Is the Modi era drawing to a close? Sardesai says no for a few reasons. It is important to understand that he approaches this question from the angle: Is Modi going away? There is another way of looking at it and we will come to that in a moment. Sardesai writes that “fierce determination” and “readiness to do whatever it takes to stay in power” will ensure that Modi completes his third term in office. He points to the recent rollbacks in policy, including on lateral recruitment, as a sign of this.
Modi’s “allies,” meaning those supporting him in office, like Chandrababu Naidu, have regional agendas to further and are uninterested in destabilising their arrangement. This is another plus. What about the RSS and its interests? Sardesai says the Sangh recognises that Modi is more popular than the BJP (per surveys) with one in four voters saying they came to the party because of him, a decrease from 2019 when it was one in three.
The absence of internal rivals for now means Modi will continue past his 75th birthday, which is less than a year away.
Next, the book looks at the question of whether Rahul Gandhi has “finally arrived as a politician of substance.” Sardesai offers a qualified “yes.” He says there has been a shift from the past (which is why the question itself of having “finally arrived” arose). Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra and of course the election results and the subsequent change inside Parliament are evidence. However there remains some work to be done, Sardesai writes, and state elections will reveal more to us about Gandhi’s leadership qualities and abilities.
The third question he takes up is whether democracy will “survive the Modi era?” This is interestingly put and the author takes up two things as indicators. First, the broad weakness in economic development in the meaningful sense of the word and, secondly, the drift towards authoritarianism under Modi. Both need to be addressed if the answer to the question is to be “yes.”
None of what Sardesai says is exceptionable. There is another way of answering the question on the Modi era and whether it has ended. What did the era mean in essence? It was the time of an individual claiming he would personally make a difference and bring to government what was missing all these decades. An honest assessment of the last decade would show that this was untrue and that the impact isn’t visible. The lives of most Indians are not different today than they were in 2014.
Today, Modi’s ability to get things done with 240 seats is limited as we have seen in the rollbacks. There is no question of claiming any longer that he is special and unique. His agency to produce masterstrokes that the Cabinet does not know about, such as his experiments with our currency and the lockdown is depleted. Much time and energy is being spent and will be spent, as Sardesai notes, in managing allies and ensuring there is no internal dissent.
He is now just another politician and the gloss of messianism is gone, forever. He will likely remain in office for the rest of this term but that is because of the factors Sardesai has listed. It is not because he still possesses what people thought he had in 2014 and to large extent in 2019. By itself, this is not a bad thing.
After so much hype, much if not most of it unjustifi ed and all of it unrealised, we have returned to a time of regular politics. Where we can focus on the hard questions of how to transition half a billion people from poverty to prosperity and how to create hundreds of millions of jobs in a time when this is more difficult than it was in the past.
It will be democracy’s finest achievement if we are able to do this and whether or not we get there we can look forward to Sardesai taking us through the journey in his five-year instalments.
