Author: Tavleen Singh
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: May 24, 2015
URL:   http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/fifth-column-a-warp-in-the-viewfinder/99/

And India stands once more, they say, on the verge of deep despair.

As a responsible political columnist, I consider it my duty to warn you to exercise judgment when you read or listen to commentary about Narendra Modi’s first year in office. If you do, you will see through the consensus that Modi has failed to bring ‘achhe din’. Nothing has changed, the pundits proclaim, nothing at all. And India stands once more, they say, on the verge of deep despair. Look carefully and you will notice that these are the same people who until May 16 last year said Modi would never become prime minister.

The same people who denied that there was a Modi wave and the same people who said after he won a full majority that India was finished as a country.

In this newspaper the day after the results, there was a full page of commentary by people who prophesied that the ‘idea of India’ was officially dead and that darkness had descended. Then when instead of darkness there appeared faint glimmers of a new dawn, they made it their purpose to nullify this. They magnified every ‘communal’ statement by Modi’s more foolish ministers and used every stone thrown through a church window to declare that Muslims and Christians were under threat.

Pay close attention, dear readers, and you will find that these are the same public intellectuals who are currently lauding Rahul Gandhi. Senior TV anchors speak nightly of a ‘resurgent’ Rahul and of how he has put the government on the ‘backfoot’. You can count on the fingers of one hand those who have pointed out that demonising industrialists is dangerous. And, that it is not just reckless but insane to assert that the Prime Minister has become an American stooge and that this is why Barack Obama praised him in Time magazine.

Now why do you think these same public intellectuals were mostly silent about mistakes made by Sonia Gandhi’s government in the past decade? Why do you think they never dared point out that it was wrong for India to have a prime minister who was accountable to the president of a political party and not to the people of India? Whenever I have asked these worthy ladies and gentlemen questions of this kind, they usually give me the ‘secularism’ lecture. How can they support a prime minister who presided over a ‘pogrom’? And when I remind them that Rajiv Gandhi presided over an even worse ‘pogrom’, they say that the difference is that Rajiv did not know what was happening. Ah and what about the big tree falling, earth shaking justification, I ask, and they say to me, ‘you are just blinded by hatred for the Gandhi family’.

The point I wish to make is that prejudice has taken the place of public discourse, and it is an ugly thing. Prejudice creates a warp in the lens through which we view political realities, and there is no better illustration of this than the benign way in which most political pundits viewed Sonia Gandhi’s reign. In the last three years of it, she was de facto prime minister, as Natwar Singh and Sanjaya Baru have confirmed, and it was in this period that policies were made that caused investors to flee our shores and the economic growth rate to halve. Jobs dried up and despair spread, but you can count on the fingers of one hand the pundits who said this.

An equally small number will admit today that although Modi’s first year in office could have been more dazzling, it has not been unimpressive. He has been criticised for not doing enough to improve the investment climate and not doing enough to improve governance. And, this is fair criticism. But it will take time to inject new life into government machinery that has functioned in second gear for decades. Machinery whose oil has been corruption. In most of Delhi’s ‘bhawans’ of power, I have seen in the past year, officials are more eager to cut red tape than ever before. This is a sign of change but it has gone unnoticed by the pundits.

This column has often argued for speedier reforms in every area of governance. I would have liked to see a much faster pace but there is at least a new direction. And, if even the small changes of the past year have caused Rahul Gandhi to charge the Prime Minister with working only for big industry, think what would have happened if more had been done? Think what leftist political pundits would have said?

Most political pundits are leftist, so observe how few have bothered to analyse the first 100 days of Rahul’s ideological brother, Arvind Kejriwal. Fair analysis would have revealed huge gaps and this would have damaged the shining aura of the left’s rising star. And, this cannot be allowed.

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