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

 

Why I am a Hindu

Title: Why I am a Hindu

Author: Shashi Tharoor

Publisher: Aleph, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9789386021106

Pages: 297

Shashi Tharoor is a politician well known for his cosmopolitan views and liberal outlook. He contested for the post of UN Secretary General in 2006, lost to Ban Ki-moon and returned to India as a junior minister in the Congress government headed by Manmohan Singh. Tharoor is an intellectual having several well-researched books to his credit. However, he is known for mixing his ideas with partisan politics and presenting them as time-honoured truths. Sensationalism is his hallmark as seen in the strange assertion in his last book titled ‘An Era of Darkness’ (reviewed earlier) in which he claimed that India's caste system was a flexible one and that it got solidified during the British rule. In this book, he eulogizes the Hindu religion’s credentials as an inherently tolerant belief system that is well adapted to the spiritual requirements of the 21st century world. He is piqued by the attempts to reduce Hinduism's message to religious bigotry made by his political opponents in the Hindutva-inspired rightists of India.

The book’s attempt to present the basics of Hindu philosophy and ethos in a format that can be easily understood by the readers is remarkably effective. Most of it is lifted from more famous references, but the credit for the lucid condensation must be given to Tharoor. Hinduism has no founder or prophets, no organized church, no compulsory beliefs or rites of worship, no uniform conception of a good life and no single sacred book. In this sense it has no fundamentals and hence no fundamentalism. There are no binding requirements to being a Hindu, not even a belief in God. The authorial diversity of Hindu scriptures and tenets is so vast that the author likens it to Wikipedia. Right in the beginning, Tharoor points out two reasons for writing this book. One is to himself try and understand the extraordinary wisdom and virtue of his faith and the other is to show that the intolerant and violent forms of political Hindutva went against the spirit of Hinduism. This itself is idiosyncratic as he describes aspects of Hindu thought that matter to him and questions practices that he is less enthusiastic about.

Tharoor reiterates time and again that he subscribes to a creed that is free of the restrictive dogmas of holy writ, one that refuses to be shackled to the limitations of a single volume of holy revelation. It is the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. Its tolerance to other faiths and modes of worship is legendary. An example presented in the book is that of Bene Israel, a community of Jews who reached India in the first century CE. It was astonishing that their Hindu neighbours did not see them as people practicing a different religion through all these centuries until a wandering Rabi from Jerusalem identified the tribe in the twentieth century.

The revival of Hinduism began with the British rule, or so the author claims. In the early period of the colonial administration, native reformers were somewhat embarrassed at the dark superstition and malicious rituals accreted on mainstream Hindu practice. Raja Ram Mohan Roy exemplifies this stream. However, the religion bounced back with full vigour in a few decades in which Swami Vivekananda becomes the representative figure. Tharoor contrasts this with a sharp observation: “It took a Vivekananda, not a Roy, to preach seven decades later, a robust, modernist and universalist Hinduism, anchored in its own precepts that could look the rest of the world’s religions in the eye and oblige them to blink “(p.115).

One great drawback of Tharoor is his propensity to mix politics with his literary work as he is a sitting MP of India's major opposition party. He laments that today's national leaders talk only about GDP growth, fiscal balance and foreign direct investment. They wear imported sunglasses and highest quality tailored linens. What do these have to do with our present topic of discussion? And this rebuke at markers of wealth coming from a flamboyant political icon as Shashi Tharoor is rather amusing. During his tenure as minister, he reportedly rued to a friend that as part of an austerity drive, he is forced to fly on ‘cattle class’ (economy class) along with other sacred cows!

Any discussion on Indian tolerance to other faiths must address the issue of how this salutary feature of Hinduism was battered mercilessly during foreign invasions that lasted a millennium. Tharoor faces this task but passes off with an apologist stance in favour of the invaders. He concurs that ‘some’ Muslim warlords had a proclivity to attack temples for their treasures and demolish them in the process. Similarly, he condones forced conversion as ‘an inclination’ of some of the conquered people to adopt the religion of their conquerors (p.103). After a few vaults of such intellectual riffraff, he grudgingly confesses to the existence of religious zeal in the Muslim warriors to smash the seats of idolatry (p.104). Tharoor also comments on the immense resilience of Hinduism. It survived innumerable invasions, raids, attacks and outright conquest. Each time, it stood strong and bounced back where lesser faiths in other countries crumbled before the invader and the majority of the population converted to the conqueror’s faith. However, Islamic invasions led to a defensive closing of the ranks and the adoption of retrograde protective practices that entrenched restrictions and prohibitions previously unknown. Restriction of entry into Hindu temples came about probably with a view to safeguard their treasures from prying eyes. Child marriage was instituted as protection for girls and even the practice of Sati were all measures of self-defence during this turbulent period of Indian history that evolved into pernicious social practices wrongly seen as intrinsic to Hinduism rather than as a reaction to assaults upon it.

The author’s firm opposition to Hindutva ideology flow out like a great stream throughout this book. As is usual in such rhetoric, a lot of half truths and plain falsehoods are also included. Anyhow, this tirade does not stop him from accepting that a temple indeed stood earlier at the site of Babri Masjid (p.181). Concerning the outrage caused by noted painter M F Husain’s nude and obscene portrayal of Hindu goddesses, he advises the Hindus to feel flattered by the fact that a Muslim artist had drawn liberally (italics mine) from Hindu ethos! This does not stop him from observing that Husain was much more circumspect and reverent towards Muslim figures he represented on the canvas. He once painted the prophet's wife as a fully clad woman in a saree which even covered her head (p.236). This articulation of freedom of expression is not extended to the Danish cartoons which portrayed the Prophet. Tharoor acknowledges them as insulting! Double standards, indeed. In another twist, he also admits that the Sangh Parivar, having seen successive governments pandering to the offended sentiments of minority communities, now want to show they could be offended too, and thereby bend society to their will (p.233). Tharoor even admits that Savarkar’s idea of Hindutva is so expansive that it covered everything that a scholar today would properly call Indic (p.145). In another self goal, he concedes that there is much to admire in Deen Dayal Upadhyaya’s thinking (p.194). India's secular existence is made possible by the fact that the overwhelming majority of Indians are Hindus (p.199). With such arguments it seems to readers that Tharoor keeps a political backdoor half open to India's right wing ruling party.

It is well known that Tharoor is assisted in his literary effort by a team consisting of people with remarkable talent. It may be due to this team work that some of the ideas are seen repeated with slight changes at different locations. This has not precluded some unconscionable errors from creeping into the narrative. Babri Masjid is said to be demolished in December 1991 rather than 1992 (p.206). Similarly, the author contends that hundred elephants are decked up for the Pooram festival at Thrissur in Kerala (p.39) whereas the actual figure is around thirty. These are no big deal, being clerical mistakes, but the carelessness of the editorial team is shocking. So is the claim that Jainism is only a separate sect in Hinduism rather than a separate faith which maybe offending to Jains (p.24). But the author might be confident that the peace-loving Jains would not go after him with brickbats, which is the only consideration some authors have in publishing sensitive content. The book is easy to read even though the author tries his usual tricks with the rich source of vocabulary at his command. Almost the entire latter half of the book is a worthless rhetoric of political correctness, having no connecting link to the issues at hand.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

An Era of Darkness

Title: An Era of Darkness – The British Empire in India

Author: Shashi Tharoor

Publisher: Aleph, 2016 (First)

ISBN: 9789383064656

Pages: 333

As the world slept, India awoke to light and freedom on a summer night in 1947 after reeling under two centuries of British rule and seven centuries of Islamic hegemony. Undoubtedly, some beneficial aspects had been bestowed on the country from the alien rule, but there is universal consensus that on the whole, the experience had been deleterious. Shashi Tharoor, former UN bureaucrat, politician, former minister in Manmohan Singh’s cabinet and writer, presents a postmortem examination of the colonial rule. His conclusion after the exercise is evident in the title of the book – ‘An Era of Darkness’. The British period in India is usually characterized by the appearance of viable political institutions, a democratic spirit, an efficient bureaucracy and the rule of law. Tharoor attacks each and every postulate with fatuous arguments that produce much light and sound, but hardly any substance. This book is written as a sequel to his speech at Oxford where he demanded reparations for the colonial misrule. However, Tharoor is content with a symbolic one pound a year as the rate at which Britain must compensate India. The author’s deft writing style is displayed in impressive detail in this book. In fact, that is the only saving grace.

Tharoor argues that India’s GDP in 1700 CE was 27% of the world’s, which nosedived to 3% in 1947 and claims that it was as a result of British rule. It is true that the British de-industrialized India, forcing the textile industry to collapse and flooded the country with machine-made cloths. Raw materials were freely exported to Britain, at the same time imposing protective tariff against Indian exports of finished cloth. However, by the late-nineteenth century, the situation had started to reverse. Mechanized mills had somewhat recovered the position. In 1896, Indian mills produced only 8% of Indian demand, which grew to 20% by 1913, 62% by 1936 and 76% in 1945. These figures take the wind out of Tharoor’s sails. His fantastical stories of the British cutting off good weavers’ thumbs and smashing machinery are simply regurgitation of local legends and hearsay. It is felt that the author does not follow the dictum that the conduct of states, as of individuals, can only be assessed by the standards of their age, not by today’s litigious criteria.

I have to stress here a point before proceeding further. My stand is that the colonial period is a blot on the nation’s history. We’d have been better off if the foreign yoke hadn’t been bolted on to our shoulders. That said, presuming it to be worse than the preceding Islamic period is sheer hypocrisy and intellectual deceit, which Tharoor seeks to establish. He posits that even without the political unity imposed by the British, a constitutional monarchy would’ve developed in the country and political institutions built upon the Mughal administration system, as modified by the Marathas. But the Mughal system also reeked of grave discrimination against the Hindus is not mentioned by the author. He falsely claims that the monarchs the British supplanted were benign. An example cited is that of the Nawab of Oudh. And the reason for saying so? Because he played chess! Such is the incongruity of the arguments raised in this book! His criticism is only intended for criticism’s sake. The British policy of systematization of administration by framing rules and written procedures is derided because it spawned red-tapism. But a corrupt bureaucracy was a legacy of the Mughal period as well, as attested by foreign travelers who visited the country in that age. Written rules in fact made the malpractices less onerous. The chapter on political unity is simply beating around the bush, covering such wide range of topics as constitutional reforms and participation in world wars. No worthwhile discussion is seen here.

Startling it may seem, but Tharoor attacks the enforcement of Rule of Law as well, accusing it to be discriminatory and citing a few cases where justice was plainly miscarried. Then again, law was not uniform in pre-colonial India too. The Muslim law treated the majority Hindus as dhimmis, or second-class citizens denuded of much civil rights automatically granted to Muslims. The Hindu law that was in force prior to that period condemned people of lower castes to the bottom rung of society, stripping even basic human rights such as the privilege to draw water from wells or use public thoroughfares. What is really shocking is the author’s growl against the British injunction on women of some parts of the South to cover their breasts in public. Tharoor blurts out that ‘Southern Indian women, whose breasts were traditionally uncovered found themselves obliged to undergo the indignity of conforming to Victorian standards of morality’ (p.111). The author’s ignorance of south Indian history is manifest in these words. Many lower castes in Kerala had waged rebellions in the nineteenth century for the right of their women to cover their breasts and the British law was in acknowledgement of these struggles. His tirade against the British-imposed Indian Penal Code (IPC) is laughable, as a few sections of it makes homosexuality a crime and follows preferential treatment to men in the case of adultery. This is, of course, against the zeitgeist of the twenty-first century. But why then did Tharoor, himself a member of parliament, and his party which had ruled the country for six decades after the British left, didn’t amend it?

British rule boded ill for India, but heaping all blame at their door is not justified, which is what this book purports to do. Many of Tharoor’s arguments are illogical. Another broadside is that colonialism made caste what it is today. He alleges that the British used their colonial power to affirm caste as the measure of all social things. Indians in pre-colonial times were said to have lived in imprecisely defined ‘fuzzy’ communities. It was the census which started counting the people from 1872 onwards that categorized them. Tharoor goes on to add that caste competition had been largely unknown in India. Devadasi system is claimed to be an honourable one, but the British clubbed it with prostitution. Of all the postulates in this book, none is more ridiculous as those on caste. Tharoor confuses caste with Vedic varnas and clearly exposes his lack of knowledge of India’s social fabric. His unawareness of India’s caste system is masked by superfluous trumpeting of irrational ideas that assign responsibility on others. There can be no denial of the fact that the backward castes of India found their voice through education mostly in British-run schools and then demanded the fair share they deserved. Another fallacious claim is that the Shia-Sunni conflict in India began only in the British period.

The author is hard put to justify the destruction of thousands of Hindu temples in the Islamic period. It is surprising that he doesn’t condemn it, but defends it as ‘simply a phenomenon of the advancing frontier, occasioned by warfare and occurring mainly in the intense frenzy of armed conflict across changing territorial lines. A royal temple symbolized the king’s power, and so destroying it signified that king’s utter humiliation’ (p.135-6). By Tharoor’s facile logic, Nadir Shah and Ahmed Shah Abdali, who had conquered the Mughal emperors at Delhi, should’ve destroyed its grand Juma Masjid, but strangely, they didn’t!

Tharoor’s wholesale blame game reaches its comic peak when he declares that advances in space and missile technology owes nothing to the colonial period, but is a product of independent India’s own efforts (p.235). This may sound serious until you remember that the space race began only in the 1950s. His blind assault on everything the British had installed extends to railway too in the assertion that railway embankments disrupted local ecology by blocking water channels and caused flood in some areas. Famines are said to have occurred only during the British period, which is outright false. There was no famine in independent India, but the pre-colonial period was replete with them. We have specific information of a great famine when the construction of Taj Mahal started in the 1630s. This is just one among many in that period. The narration falls to the level of storytelling at some points.

This book’s source of reference material is a questionable one. Little known authors are referred as authoritative faculty and Nehru’s remarks against the British are treated as clinching evidence in favour of the author’s argument. Tharoor punctures the validity of his own contentions with an immediately following vacuous disclaimer that ‘this does not mean that pre-colonial India was…’. You can argue anything with that kind of an escape route behind you. The book makes Gandhiji out to be a stupid figure, having no fixed or valid point of view on anything. Tharoor ridicules the father of the nation on his opinion on how children should be educated. The greatest slur, however, is reserved in the chronology section of the book where Gandhiji is described as ‘Indian nationalist and Hindu political activist who developed the strategy of nonviolent disobedience that forced Christian Great Britain to grant independence to India’.

The book, taken altogether, is a sheer waste of time and hence is not recommended.

Rating: 2 Star