There is no point in denying that in these past ten years of ‘acche din’ this problem has been mostly ignored.
Two things happened after the campaign ended last week. Narendra Modi flew to Kanyakumari to meditate, with TV cameras recording every moment of this latest spiritual excursion. In painfully lengthy detail was shown the Prime Minister’s chopper hovering over the rock where Vivekananda meditated, as were Modi’s salutations to Surya the next morning and the stillness of his visage as his meditation began. He must be very good at meditating if he can do it with so many cameras trained on his every move. On the morning of the Surya worship came the dramatic news that Donald Trump is now a convicted felon, but our Prime Minister’s spiritual journey took precedence on news channels I watched.
The second thing that happened in this interregnum between voting and results was that the man who was prime minister before Modi came forward to denounce him publicly. Dr Manmohan Singh was quoted on the front page of this newspaper as saying, “No Prime Minister in the past has uttered such hateful, unparliamentary and coarse terms meant to target either a specific section of the society or the opposition…” He added that it was now our duty to save our “beloved nation” from these forces of discord.
Speaking for me, personally, the good doctor’s words had more resonance than Modi’s meditation. This is because the coarsened discourse and the hostilities in this campaign have been very worrying. It has often seemed more like a fight between enemies than democratic opponents. There is no question that the level of discourse has plunged to a very low point. But can Modi be entirely blamed? I have vivid memories of the last Lok Sabha election when Rahul Gandhi called the Prime Minister a thief. Remember how many times he repeated ‘chowkidar chor hai’? Remember how many times he repeated that Modi had stolen money from the Rafale deal and put it in ‘the pocket of Anil Ambani?’ Coarsening of political dialogue goes further back to another election when his Mummy called Modi a salesman of death (maut ka saudagar)?
When our most important political leaders start hurling abuse at each other the worst thing that happens is that they forget that they should be talking about policies. We should be hearing about what they would like to do for India. We should be hearing about their vision for our future. Instead, what we got in this election were unending promises of freebies. No country became prosperous or developed by giving people handouts of money and free foodgrain. No country got rid of poverty by serving dollops of charity to those who promised to continue living below the poverty line. Rahul Gandhi has promised that he will count every poor family in the country and offer Rs 8,500 a month to the woman of the family. When he finishes calculating the number of deserving women it could be time for the next general election.
The Prime Minister’s campaign has been equally depressing. Before he went off to meditate on Vivekananda’s rock, he declared in an interview that he had been sent by God to save India. No politician is sent by God. They are elected by the people and if there are those who believe they are messengers of God they should confine themselves to temples and meditation. It is dangerous for messiahs to enter politics. Dangerous not just for them but for those who vote for them.
In this race to lower the level of discourse his opponents were not far behind. Along with promises of free jobs and pocket money came the constant refrain that it would be dangerous to vote Modi back to power because he would end democracy and the Constitution. Indian voters may be poor and semi-literate but most of them are not fooled by alarmist theories or messiahs. They know that their votes should go to those who will bring some prosperity into their wretched lives. This is why the Ram Temple has been less important than unemployment. This is the one issue that has vitalised voters across India. And there is no point in denying that in these past ten years of ‘acche din’ this problem has been mostly ignored.
Another thing that should scare us, and those we voted for, is that India is among the few countries left in the world who has not been able to provide her citizens with their most basic need: clean water. In the last days of the campaign people were in the streets of Delhi trying desperately to buy water from tankers because on the hottest days of this summer their sources of water totally dried up. In Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, there were similar scenes.
If after seventy-five years of independence the average Indian needs to struggle for something as basic as clean drinking water, it is not just our politicians who should be ashamed but our policymakers, and political parties. As for us in the media, we cannot escape blame. Only when there is a crisis do we notice that the average Indian has been denied access to his most basic needs. What puzzles me as much is why the hundreds of reporters covering this election never noticed how filthy the conditions are in which most Indians live. For me the enduring memory of this election is images of waste plastic along new highways and dumps of rotting garbage across rural India.
