As someone who prefers India as a pluralist and secular society, I have my problems with this government as many editions of this column will have shown over the years. This is based on a difference rooted in ideology and principles. I think, like many others, that Hindutva is problematic and an unnatural imposition on this country. Of its achievements, the list of things to dislike and disagree with is long.
If asked to pick out at least a couple of things that I ‘like’ about what this dispensation has done, I would say that this prime minister is full-throated in his assault on minorities unlike his BJP predecessor. And the second thing is that because of this he has produced a devoted following, that is satisfied with his actions.
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This might seem like a petty concession and that something else ought to be pointed out, but it is not easy. When one is assessing a saga that is currently in its 12th year, the impact of the entirety of it is hard to escape. When one finds a movie unwatchable, there is no point in then saying, well it was unwatchable but the hero’s costume changes were good. It gets only a star and a half from this reviewer, and that too with reluctance. But clearly there is another side to this, of those people who think that the movie is terrific and this column is about them.
No matter what else he does, so long as the focus on minorities remains, through laws of discrimination, policies of exclusion and rhetoric of loathing, this following is not discontent. What I wanted to do today was to try and write about this phenomenon, which I believe to be real as the evidence shows all around us. It is not an insignificant part of the population and for this reason interesting to look at.
Events just of these past few weeks provide us with material to examine. Take the Goods and Services Tax. When it was passed almost a decade ago, we were told it was a next generation reform that would turbocharge India’s economy. The government’s experts lined up on television saying, without explaining how, that it would add 2% to GDP. This turned out to not be the case.
The Opposition complained that it was too complicated for businesses, too onerous a burden on the poor because its indirect taxes hit them disproportionately, and too unfair for states because they no longer controlled revenue. All of these complaints were valid because they were true.
This week, by tweaking the rates, once again we are being told that this is a next generation reform because the original was flawed. Why this took the better part of a decade to realise this is a question one will ask only if one is not from the cohort of devoted supporters. For them that 2017 GST was great and this 2025 one is also terrific.
The morning’s newspaper carries the headline: ‘Trump makes U-turn on India, calls PM Modi ‘a great friend’ a day after ‘lost to darkest China’ swipe’. Has he undone his 50% tariffs? No. Has his administration changed its policy or even its language on punishing India for buying Russian oil? No. Trump’s commerce secretary on the same day offered public comments resulting in this headline in the same newspaper: ‘India will say sorry and make a deal in two months: Lutnick’.
Where is Trump’s U-turn? It is in the minds of the believers. A third headline from today: ‘Amid US-India tariff row, PM Modi not to address UNGA in New York later this month’. The problem continues, but if we have convinced ourselves that we have triumphed then why should the facts matter?
For five years, since the opening months of 2020, this nation has been told to view China as the enemy. The devotees were told to delete Chinese apps and to throw away their televisions. They were fed theories of how we would partner with America to fix China. Geo-strategic-wallahs in think tanks aligned with the government wrote tracts in praise of this seismic shift, bringing us in alignment with the West.
A few days ago, this sentiment has not only stopped it seems to have been reversed. Now China is our ally and with it by our side we will erase US dominance. Do the Chinese see us differently now than in 2020 or before? Of course not. They do not change how they think with such suppleness as this government can get its backers to do. It is we who are realigning our mind to adjust to circumstances. It’s our ‘Look East Look West Look East etc’ policy. It makes perfect sense.
As I said, there are not many things to be liked about what has been done over the last dozen years. The damage is real and it will remain with us for decades. But it is difficult not to appreciate the skill and magnetism of the pied-piper leading his followers to future glory, ignoring the debris of the present all around them.
By Aakar Patel
