The Paradoxical Prime Minister

Title: The Paradoxical Prime Minister – Narendra Modi and His India

Author: Shashi Tharoor

Publisher: Aleph Book Company, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9789388292177

Pages: 504

 

Do you want to read a political manifesto of a maverick politician that runs into 500 pages of every-bit-politically-correct homilies? You are welcome to this book if you have nothing worthwhile to do. This book was written in 2018, with one year to go for general elections, in the fervent hope that Narendra Modi would be defeated. With huge amounts of cleverly interpreted data and gusts of hot air with lofty principles but no substance, Tharoor hoped to anticipate Modi’s ‘downfall’ which would have burnished his image as an astute politician having his ears to the ground. However, nothing happened eventually. With the declaration of the results, Modi retained power with a larger majority than before and Tharoor’s dreams crashed down like a pack of cards which made his arguments and this book irrelevant. It gives political observers some amusement at the shortsightedness of the author’s arguments with the advantage of hindsight.

 

Modi and his political party, the BJP, are spawned by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The basic theme of the book is Tharoor’s assumption that the RSS is a retrograde organisation that cannot be reconciled to good governance. It tries to divide the people along religious lines. Even though Modi is using high-sounding projects to unleash India’s inherent power, he is constrained by his association with this organisation. This is, in one sentence, what Tharoor elaborates as a glaring paradox using 500 pages of print. He predicted in 2014 that if this contradiction is not resolved, Modi will fail. Obviously, the RSS still guided BJP at the time of publication of this book, so Modi has failed. But the paradox is seen more in Tharoor as he argues in another section that the RSS was in a dilemma over whether or not to support Modi in the 2019 elections (p.82). This is contradictory to the earlier assessment of unbridled involvement. Tharoor also coins a new term, ‘Moditva’, as the ideology that guides the prime minister. This is claimed to be a combination of Hindutva, nationalism, economic development and overweening personal relationship.

 

Looking back after three years of its publication, we see that the book abounds with self-defeating arguments which the author’s poor foresight could not perceive. Criticising Modi’s quip that the government has no business to be in business, Tharoor questions the anomaly of his government owning and running airlines and hotels. This was well before Air India going Tata’s way. Often, we find the author handling data without any slightest hint of where and to whom it belongs. Incidents of rape reportedly increased by 12.4 per cent in 2016 due to Modi’s fault. Luckily, he does not find the prime minister responsible for the twenty per cent drop in rainfall that year!  When it is time for giving a spin on plain truth, the author does it with unabashed ingenuity. Narrating the Godhra incident, the author notes that ’58 men, women and children were killed when a fire broke out on their train as it passed through the Muslim-dominated town of Godhra’. Yes, a fire somehow spontaneously broke out in the train, regarding the origin of which Tharoor has no clue. Can you visualize the wicked smile on his face after writing this deceitful sentence? This is the genre of India’s liberals.

 

The book seems to be a collective effort with inputs from several people because readers can observe subtle contradictions in many chapters. What is consistent in the entirety of the text is its double standards. If liberals criticize Modi on social media, it is ‘freedom of expression’. If his fans pay back in the same coin, it becomes a ‘virulent attack’. He claims that Modi is known in hostile social media circles as ‘feku’ (congenital teller of tall tales), but after some pages, laments that ‘those who speak ill of Modi is being jailed’. Does it mean that all those people who called him ‘feku’ were jailed? In many places, we see Modi being accused of ruining India’s economy. But on demonetization, the book notes that ‘a booming economy that boasted the highest growth rate in the world suddenly became a cash-scarce economy’ (p.336). So, unwittingly he admits that it was booming and with the highest growth rate in the world! No Indian liberal would dream of ending his essay without pandering to Muslim sentiments. A liberal politician doubly so. In a sweeping stroke of indemnification, Tharoor claims that ‘if the Muslim sultans had looted or exploited India and Indians, they spent the proceeds of their loot in India itself’ (p.97).

 

With his abortive UN career behind him, Tharoor thinks he is the guru of foreign policy and the government would do well if they care to learn a lesson or two from him. Strangely, he advises against a strong foreign policy and wants India to be perceived as a soft state. Our country had a disastrous foreign policy for the last thousand years which the author wants to continue and is sure to get duly crumbled up at the slightest challenge from across the border. Perhaps it is in these conditions that ‘strong’ men like him could thrive. Tharoor accuses that ‘an assertive foreign policy, especially towards neighbours, is an aspect of fascism’ (p.61). As is common in this book, we find a contradiction on p.428 when the author warns that ‘a country that refuses to suffer repeated body blows earns more respect than one whose restraint can be interpreted as weakness’. The book includes a near-comprehensive policy analysis of India’s relations with other countries, but keeps silent on the Israel – Palestine issue as Tharoor knows only too well that even the slightest complimentary remark on Israel would lose him precious Muslim votes in the next election.

 

The author takes special care to insert Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘glorious’ deeds for the nation in practically every chapter. No prizes for guessing the reason, as his party boss is the youngest scion of the Nehru family. But this runs into problems. Regarding sedition law, Tharoor quotes Nehru as saying that ‘the sooner we get rid of this provision, the better’. Nehru remained at the helm for seventeen years till his death, but did not find time to abrogate the law. Now, Tharoor holds Modi responsible for keeping this law in our statute books. Some of the author’s concerns smell of deep-rooted provincialism. For example, he worries about failure of population control schemes because ‘it increases the numbers of Hindi speakers’ (p.192). What he finds objectionable in the implementation of GST, apart from the claimed haphazard manner, is that it was made applicable to Jammu and Kashmir, thereby ignoring the state’s special status.

 

In a reverse sense, the book is a fine example of what should be avoided in a multi-ethnic society like India. Tharoor accuses Modi of total failure including the – in truth much successful – Swachh Bharat mission. The reasons cited are laughable. In a bout of insouciant elitism, Tharoor claims that ’45 per cent of north Indians found open defecation pleasurable, comfortable or convenient’ (p.284). Since the author’s political constituency is in the south of the country, he feels confident to abuse the northerners. His political intuition is demonstrated to be little developed when he mockingly asks whether Modi could amend articles 370 and 35A of the Constitution that granted special privileges to Jammu and Kashmir. Tharoor could not imagine even in his wildest dreams that exactly the same thing would happen hardly a year later. So much for his outlook!

 

Tharoor ingeniously employs selective emphasis of numbers to read what he wants from otherwise reliable data sets. With this clever trick up his sleeve, he can interpret data anyway he wants. He claims that Gujarat was in the eighteenth position in terms of literacy when Modi left office as the state’s chief minister. Pretty damning, isn’t it? But if you spend some time and look up the data, it can be seen that, of the large states, only Kerala, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu stood above it. The others are microscopic union territories with populations typically below 100,000. Another aspect of Tharoor’s game with data is selective focusing on figures of specific years. On p.361, he blurts out that ‘the current account deficit had risen to 2 per cent in the last quarter of 2017 and may well cross 2.5 per cent of GDP in Mr. Modi’s final fiscal year’. The true nature of this moral outrage is exposed if we lookup data elsewhere and observe that in the final two years of UPA government, of which Tharoor himself was a minister, the corresponding figures were 4.3 and 4.8 per cent! The author lampoons Modi for setting ambitious targets for solar power generation, but no concrete measures have been taken (p.364). The actual fact is entirely different. In 2014, the installed solar capacity was 2,632 MW, which skyrocketed to 21,651 MW in just four years, which is more than eight times in sheer numbers. The conclusion we can arrive at from all these is that Tharoor’s data is totally unreliable.

 

Even while listing out a litany of complaints, Tharoor makes richly adorned praise for Modi that is embedded inconspicuously in the text. It would be interesting to present here the glowing nature of the tribute. Tharoor concedes Modi to ‘excel at how to impress an audience’ (p.20), ‘never shied away from hard work’ (p.22), ‘independent and self-reliant’ (p.24), ‘compelling orator, the best modern India has ever seen’ (p.35), ‘capable of speaking across the political divide’ (p.40), ‘possessing real austerity and devotion to work’ (p.50), ‘given away most of his salary to charity’ (p.51), ‘a quick student, mastering a vast array of information and retaining it with impressive recall’ (p.64), ‘excelling at direct communication with the masses’ (p.83), ‘recognized the real problem in railways’ (p.382), ‘visibly effective salesman for India, and there is no denying the energy and dynamism he has brought to taking India’s message abroad’ (p.436). Whoa, even Modi’s ardent backers will not be able to list out such a long slew of high accolade.

 

As commented earlier, this book is just sterile eloquence, written as a political manifesto for the author’s 2019 election campaign and to provide a bucket list of salient issues that can be arraigned against the government. Harping on to a small time window, Tharoor has made this book irrelevant thereafter, unlike his other works. Grave predictions like ‘Modi’s term is lurching towards its inglorious conclusion’ expose this elitist politician’s scant grasp of the ground reality and utter ignorance of how people thought. To make up for that gaping hole in his skill set, the book is stuffed with a heavy dose of moral sermon. Imitating the author’s penchant for lesser-known, high-sounding epithets, I would describe this book as a ‘pretentious cant’.

 

The book is a waste of time and not recommended.

 

Rating: 2 Star