The elections are behind us and a minority government styled as Modi 3.0 has taken office. A reinvigorated Opposition has already seen the presentation of the Union Budget, which has picked ideas from the Congress manifesto, like the apprenticeship programme to address the burning crisis of jobs for the millions. This should be a good sign in democratic politics. Good ideas can come from everywhere. The government could give credit to the Congress and earn some goodwill from the party in return. This is a time for the government of Narendra Modi to recognise and respect the new reality of the new Lok Sabha and to understand that long-term success in politics and complex issues of governance demands the approach of give and take. The first pre-requisite for this is to lower the political temperature to get some real work done. But instead, the government has contributed to raising the political temperature even more. All indications are that the bitterness of the election season isn’t going away.      

The new attack quite obviously targeting the Congress on the Emergency by proclaiming June 25 as the annual “Samvidhaan Hatya Diwas”, Home Minister Amit Shah’s latest political attacks on Uddhav Thackeray of the Shiv Sena and Sharad Pawar of the Nationalist Congress Party, and indeed the personal appearance of Prime Minister Modi at the wedding of Mukesh Ambani’s son when rising wealth and income inequality has been brought into sharp focus, all appear to indicate that it’s compulsion and/or “business as usual” for the Modi Sarkar, and to that extent, it mocks the nation and its people who clearly decided not to give the incumbent a clear mandate for the third term.  The government’s answer is to keep the pot boiling as it lives a Rip Van Winkle story – almost as if it slept through the election results and now wants to live an old reality in a new world.

Confrontation not accommodation 

Indeed, accommodation and conciliation should have been the approach even with a brute majority that the government did have in its previous term. But that brought hubris, and it is the hubris in large part that brought the political defeat. No lessons have been learned. Indeed, they cannot be, because learnability does not go with a self-righteousness that digs in and a greed that wants to grab it all, be it votes, attention, or narratives. This is a command and control mind at work; national issues are pictured as war and everything is fair because the only outcome must be for the leader to win at all costs.  

In many ways, the story is reflection of the internal emptiness of the BJP, which has not been able to fix accountability for its showing in the Lok Sabha and has been rendered incapable of reflection or raising hard questions for itself. The vice-like grip that Modi has on the party is at one level a political success for him because which leader doesn’t like a party that asks no questions of the leader? Some internal noises are emerging: an important group has raised questions on the working of the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, and for the electoral losses in that state, the RSS chief has yet again offered remarks not seen as favourable to Modi but all these are oblique signs of an internal unease. Direct questions and downright analysis are missing in the party. For all the accusations of the Congress being a family-run party, the BJP has only followed the path it seeks to condemn, becoming in little time the preserve of the vagaries of the Modi-Shah thinking. This capture tells us a lot about the party and its fibre, more than any history-telling can.

It is not difficult to see that the duo has survived by constantly distracting attention. This has inevitably brought us an unending game of bogey-hunting. Consider the latest example of just how much the break and bitterness is with the Opposition on the simple issue of a NITI-Aayog meeting – which was the ninth governing council meeting, and was chaired by Modi just last week. The Aayog’s governing council is “the premier body tasked with evolving a shared vision of national priorities and strategies, with the active involvement of States”. This is one place where the government could and should have worked hard so that all the chief ministers of all the states were respectfully accommodated.

On a dangerous path

Instead, as many as ten chief ministers did not attend. The only Opposition voice present, Mamata Banerjee, walked out and complained that her mic was muted and she felt insulted. The arrogance in the later remarks of the NITI Aayog CEO BVR Subrahmanyam speaks for itself: “For those who did not participate, I always say that it is their loss.” 

Where do these ideas come from? The slanging match on why she walked out and if the mic was muted is an example of how lower-order conversations are fueled and relished. It is for the government of the day at the Centre to stop this slide, to build confidence, and to earn some credibility with the Opposition parties, who are as much representatives of the people. The open fissures that the Union Budget has caused are troubling. On the one hand, it saw an ally like Nitish Kumar of Bihar skip the NITI Aayog meeting, reportedly on Bihar not being given the special status recognition it asked for. At the other end, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin has issued a strong statement on the injustice meted out to his state in the Union Budget, stating that the BJP wants revenge against all those states that voted out the BJP, and Tamil Nadu in particular. It is clear that the government, now overly dependent on two allies, is incapable of carrying everybody along, probably even the allies themselves. 

Soon after the elections, one view was that the BJP appropriately cut to size by the electorate would be now forced to listen and be mindful of boundaries. That has not happened. The other view then may hold, which is that a diminished BJP at the Centre, unable to handle criticism and unskilled in charting the middle path, may end up doing more harm to the nation and its democratic traditions.

(The writer is a journalist and faculty member at SPJIMR, Mumbai. Views are personal. By special arrangement with The Billion Press)