-Dr. Rahul Kumar
In the Indian context, history stands witness that Indian voters are habitually slackers. They take a long time to observe things very slowly. According to media reports, 2019 Lok Sabha elections was the most expensive election in the history of Indian democracy. To win 303 seats, the Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) spent more 27,000 crore and the majority of the funds were donated by the corporates such as Adani Group, Ambani Group, Bajaj Group and many more like them which are patronized by the BJP.
Indian National Congress as an opposition party could win only 52 seats and after this embarrassing defeat, the Congress party is out of power in 18 states of India making it very difficult situation for the party to revive. After the defeat, it is natural that Rahul Gandhi as President of Indian National Congress (INC) must be subjected to criticism so it is happening. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the country are passing their judgments about what Rahul Gandhi or the Congress party should do.
As is a common thing in every society of the world that when a person falls sick he or she is advised by friends, relatives to take this medicine or that medicine. Similarly, Indian Journalists are putting forth their opinions to Rahul Gandhi through their regular columns. I had read three articles written by three senior eminent Indian Journalists.
Rajdeep Sardesai, in his article, “Why Rahul Gandhi Quitting is not a bad idea” writes, “why doesn’t Rahul Gandhi undertake a 100-day padayatra across the state to identify himself fully with the critical issue of agrarian distress instead of being cooped up in Lutyens Delhi? Remember, it was a 3500 km padayatra that has dramatically transformed Jagan Reddy’s political career. Can Rahul do a Jagan and take up the challenge of revival or will he end up almost as a tragic Shakespearean hero, unsure of what he really wants to do, thereby only further aggravating the Congress crisis?
Neerja Chowdhary in her article, “Let him go” writes, “maybe Rahul Gandhi can undertake a padayatra going around the country, with folded hands, only to understand what young and old India has to say about Congress’s mistakes and what it should do. After all, Jagan Reddy undertook a 3,000 km padyatra to great effect in Andhra Pradesh, as did his late father Y S Rajasekhara Reddy”.
Barkha Dutta in her article, “India needs a new opposition party “writes, “Gandhis must give up control of the party”. Will a Journalist decide who should or who should not run a political party? Let us remember, Modi and Shah could not completely achieve the goal of making “Congress Mukt Bharat” in 2019. The 52 winning seats by the Congress party shows that Indian voters still like the Congress party.
Rahul Gandhi as a mature and stable politician should religiously follow what Max Weber, a German sociologist in his extraordinary lecture on the subject, Politics as a Vocation concludes, “ great leadership – leadership as a vocation – combines three qualities: passion, a sense of responsibility and a sense of proportion. The leader must recognize that ‘Politics means slow, powerful drilling through hard boards … Our entire historical experience confirms … that what is possible could never have been achieved unless people had tried again and again to achieve the impossible in this world’. This needs heroic idealism, but also what he calls an ‘ethic of responsibility’: the coolness that marks a leader willing to make painful choices and to accept the blame whatever the result.
I shall not debate here the faulty Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) or benevolence of the Indian Election Commission of India. Nothing can be done now. Today the election scenario in India has completely changed. Earlier the Indian voters were casting their votes to a political party which shall help them to reduce their pitiful poverty; which shall help them to build new roads, hospitals and educational institutions.
Today it is not like that. The minds of the Indian voters are made up by the media, print or social. A similar thing happened during the 2019 election campaigns. As everyone knows that the majority of the corporate media is favoring the BJP since the party doles out government advertisements worth millions to them. Not only this, the BJP gives crony capitalists anything & everything they want.
Following two examples shall prove my allegations, India TV news channel run by Rajat Sharma telecast only news, debates in favor of the BJP. The anti-congress news is run 24×7 by India TV news channel. Vile propaganda is crafted and debated over such news channel to defame the leaders of the opposition party. Rajat Sharma is so popular that he was invited by the BJP during the second Swearing-in- Ceremony of the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.
Another example, There is a “WhatsApp University” the term coined by a noted senior Indian TV Journalist Ravish Kumar. WhatsApp University owned and run by the BJP, RSS, Bajrang Dal and thousands of Hindu big or small state-level organizations send fake news 24×7 to the Indian voters to their mobile phones against the leaders of the opposition parties. The tragedy is that the rural and urban voters in India generally make up their minds by seeing the news on the Television sets.
See the news about Robert Vadra, a businessman, the husband of Priyanka Gandhi. He is the son-in-law of Sonia Gandhi and brother-in-law of Rahul Gandhi on news TV Channels. For all news TV channels, Robert Vadra is a political trophy to be kept in the headquarters of the ruling BJP. Modi-Shah is destroying rational & balanced TV channels. A recent example of Prannoy, Radhika Roy Co-founder & Executive Co-Chairperson of New Delhi Television(NDTV) channel barred by SEBI from accessing, or even associating with the capital markets for two years. Rumors are there that this is the handiwork of Modi-shah. The scuttling of freedom of press reminds of the collapse of the Soviet system in which literature, musical expression was repressed; books were removed from libraries and destroyed under the Stalin era.
The duty of media as a Fourth Estate is to hold the respective governments accountable but in India, it is the reverse. The majority of the media houses protect the ruling BJP. During 17th Lok Sabha elections, the corporate media houses did not talk about corruption, fiscal deficit, unemployment, religious disharmony, social conflict due to hungry jackals of RSS, Bajrang Dal, etc.
There are two important historical incidents occurred in India before the 2019 elections. One is Pulwana(J&K) terror attack in which 44 Central Reserve Police Force(CRPF) soldiers were brutally killed and 70 were injured by a suicide bomber. Second is Pakistan`s Balakot strikes by the Indian Air Forces in which 170 Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists were killed. Conspiracy theorists assert that Pulwana attack was premeditated under the nose of the Modi government.
The irony is that not a single TV channel ever debated how did Pulwana terror attack occur? Who is responsible for lapses of the security arrangements in the hub of the CRPF camps? But Modi-Shah and its allies repeatedly tried to convince the Indian voters that they avenged the brutal deaths of 44 CRPF soldiers by striking the Balakot terrorist camps in Pakistan. Print, social media and Whatapp University were flashing the news of the victory of Balakot to each and every voter of the country.
It is unfortunate that not a single TV channel except NDTV debated the failures of more than 450 schemes launched by Modi government in 2014. Not a single Smart City has been built by the Modi government in five years. On the foreign policy front, Modi government`s sluggish and obsequious international bilateral engagements gave leverage to China. Today, Nepal plays to the tune of the Chinese government and showing eyes to India.
America under President Donald Trump levied costly import duty taxes on Indian products. Pakistan after Balakot strikes by Indian Air Forces closed Air space for Indian flights thereby Air India is to incur a loss of Rs 6 crore per day for the extra distance that its flights to the US and Europe have to cover. The issues like Demonetization, GST was buried underneath Balakot air strikes in Pakistan.
The list of failures of the Modi government is quite long. Here are few, total liabilities of the government has increased by 49 percent to Rs 82 lakh crore in the last four-and-half years during the Narendra Modi government.
Non-Performing Assets(NPAs) from the power generation sector alone comprise around 5.9% of the banking sector`s total outstanding advances of Rs 4.73 trillion, according to Economic Survey 2016-17. India is far behind than China in higher education institutes (HEIs). Two decades ago, China GERD was lower than India, It has quadrupled since then. India`sgross enrolment ratio(GER) in 2017-18 was 25.2% but it is still far from meeting the Ministry of Human Resources Development target of achieving 30% GER by 2020. As per the latest rankings, 22 Chinese universities found a place in the top 500 list as compared to 9 from India. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2017 shows that most of India’s rural youth lack such skills. More than half of rural youth in India, aged 14-18, struggles with basic arithmetic.
The World Bank reported India has world`s largest un-electrified population More than 300 million Indians still live without electricity. In fact, the sector has had to be bailed out twice, costing the exchequer Rs 350 billion in 2001, and more than four times that—Rs 1.9 trillion—a decade later. The bailout equaled one percent of India’s GDP and more than the entire GDP of Nepal. Had there been no bailout, these funds could have been used to set up some 15,000 hospitals and 123,000 schools. Economically India becomes a nation of financial predators.
An example of a big lie by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his twitter account says, “28th April 2018 will be remembered as a historic day in the development journey of India. Yesterday, we fulfilled a commitment due to which the lives of several Indians will be transformed forever! I am delighted that every single village in India now has access to electricity.
According to a joint study conducted by ASSOCHAM and EY, India is home to the largest number of malnourished children in the world. It was found that close 40% of Indian children were reportedly undernourished in the year 2015
Narendra Modi will not be able to bridge a religious schism between Hindu- Muslim. According to Pew Research Center Analysis, India as the fourth worst in the world for religious intolerance. In the country of 1.3 billion, the incidence of hostility related to religion trailed only Syria, Nigeria, and Iraq, all places where sectarian violence is widespread.
The issue of child labour is always in the news in India. The Uttar Pradesh(UP), a most populous state of India is currently ruled by the BJP. According to a Campaign against Child Labour(CAC) study, India has 1,26,66,377 child labourers of which UP has 19,27,997 child labourers.
The mastery of self- aggrandizing, narcissist Modi is that when the economic news is good, Modi takes credit for it; when it is bad, he blames Gandhi family. Modi is not an economist and knows nothing about tariff buff. Reservation meant for the SCs/STs is being systematically destroyed by Modi government. Hindus of India are happy to see that Modi is fulfilling their dream of destroying Reservation hence they vote en masse for the BJP. The hands of ruling BJP is stained with the blood of innocent Muslims, Dalits, Christians. The specter of Modi is haunting all the minority communities day and night. Repression of human rights, unjust imprisonment by state chieftains, political vendetta, political intrigues are the satanic me’tier of the ruling BJP.
A fascist Hitler capitalized on war and economic depression and rose to power but in the last days of his life, he was depressed and isolated. Modi-Shah has also been capitalizing on religion, illiteracy, and ignorance of the people of India. Today Hindus of India is basking in the power glory of Modi-Shah but they will realize their mistake sooner or later.
Modi a man of empty heart, a master deal-maker, a chess master has failed miserably to fulfill his promises especially in sectors like Education, Health, Energy, and Banking. The situation is an apocalypse. Governments run by Twitter, Whatapp, Facebook would not sustain for a long time. The edifice of government built on large –scale falsehood will not stand the truth sooner or later. Fabrication of colossal untruths by the masters of big lies will be exposed.
The situation is critical in India. The disease and squalor, the poverty of education and employment that we face today are not the result of acts of God or blind forces but are the surest and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men. Modi is a creature of RSS. The RSS agenda is to establish ‘Hindu Rashtra’ and for that, the suppression of the minority communities and dehumanizing of Muslims particularly is an essential step. Constitutional democracy does not allow the majority to repress minority communities.
Manipulation of the society is at large. No competition, no free science is tolerated by the Modi government. Freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly is colossally suppressed. Crazy killing in the daylight of Muslims, Dalits and Christians by a handful of Modi`s minions have become a regular feature. A common man is depressed, alienated and doomed. The government of Modi is drifting towards salve economy. The social, economic and religious disorder created by Modi-Shah is not going to resolve soon.
The current social, economic conditions in the country indicate that social and political instability would intensify in the coming days. It is also possible that the poverty-stricken, marginalized sections of the society would restore to revolt, retaliation, violence, backlash, strikes, and demonstrations and to some extent damage to national property and human life. To save the country from chaos and civil war, there is an urgent need to dismantle Modi-Shah fort.
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Dr. Rahul Kumar, Ph.D. Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. India. He is an independent researcher and senior media columnist. He is a member of the Editorial Committee of Global Research Forum for Diaspora and Transnationalism (GRFDT) New Delhi. India. He can be contacted at[email protected].
The views expressed by the author in this article are personal and does not necessarily reflect the official policy of Samaj Weekly.
