The Morning Context India's Future

Narendra Modi’s New
India is Pakistan by
another name
Kapil Komireddi
https://themorningcontext.com/chaos/narendra-modis-new-india-is-pakistan-by-another-name
14 February 2022
Copyright © The Morning Context
“The future is certain. It is the past that is

unpredictable.”
That old Soviet epigram feels increasingly like an epitaph for Narendra
Modi’s New India. The squalid present we inhabit—replete with death,
disease, disparity, discrimination, joblessness, sectarian strife,
communal disharmony, cronyism, institutional degeneration,
constitutional debasement—is nothing like the sleek vision of the future
that mesmerized so many Indians eight years ago. So the regime that
engineered our national nightmare, too sinister to self-examine and too
vain to self-correct, has resorted to exonerating itself by recasting the
past. And it isn’t the remote past, over which so much blood has
already been spilled, that is the target on this occasion. As the prime
minister’s speech last week in parliament clarified, the objective of the
Bharatiya Janata Party now is to more than distort our distant memory:
it is to deny our immediate experience.
The prime minister must appreciate that there is fakery so flagrant that
even the most gullible will struggle to swallow it. This is why, like an
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angler baiting his hook with a lure to fool the fish, Modi encases his
fabrications in emotive truths to make Indians susceptible to them. This
is his special technique. And it follows a sequence. He begins by
recollecting a grievance dating back to old India—some instance of
injustice, some misdeed by those who now occupy the benches
opposite him in parliament. Then, magnifying its enormity with his
astringent rhetoric, he scratches at the scabs formed by time. Finally,
when he senses that his listeners’ fury for him has been eclipsed by a
resurgent indignation at what came before him, he fires off a fusillade of
self-exculpating falsehoods.
What is left in the end is a debris strewn with some factual non-
sequiturs about India before Modi—and many brazen lies about India
after Modi. For the opposition to attempt to sift through it is to trap itself
in the self-exhausting sport of litigating the past and distracting from the
present. In this way, rather than admit or acknowledge his government’s
failure, the prime minister succeeds in painting everything prior to his
ascent as a sham—and himself as India’s saviour and redeemer.
Modi’s performance last Monday, when he sought to blame the

opposition for the calamity that began unfolding on his guard in 2020,
was egregious even by his own standards. More than half a million
Indian lives, according to the government’s own data, have been
devoured by the coronavirus in the past two years. The actual toll is
probably closer to six million. There is no precedent for this tragedy in
India’s republican history. The last time so many Indians died in such a
short span was in 1943, when India was a British colony. Modi, of
course, did not cause the pandemic any more than Churchill caused the
Bengal famine. But, like Churchill, he aggravated its effects. The sorrow
and torment that have washed over India are inseparable from the
conduct of our self-enamoured supremo.
“The struggle of man of power is the struggle of memory against

forgetting.” That was Milan Kundera’s warning to peoples who permit
the manipulation of their minds. Since Modi omitted the second wave of
the virus from his speech, let us, for our own sanity, recall his actions
during the first. The first COVID-19 case in India was detected on 30
January 2020. Yet as late as 13 March—two days after the declaration
of a global pandemic by the World Health Organization, whose advice
against travel the prime minister now conveniently cites to fault the
opposition—the government was assuring Indians that COVID-19 did
not constitute a health emergency. It was only on 19 March that the
government ordered a halt on most exports of lifesaving equipment. An
inventory of what was available revealed the extent of Modi’s
negligence in the crucial weeks when the global spread of the virus had

become unstoppable. There were 40,000 respiratory systems in a
country of more than 1.3 billion people, one doctor for every 11,600
patients, one isolation bed for every 84,000 people, and one hospital
bed for every 1,826 Indians. Modi had had nearly two months to equip
India. He squandered that time on throwing a lavish reception for
Donald Trump in Gujarat and toppling the government in Madhya
Pradesh.
It was only after Modi announced the largest lockdown in history with a
four-hour notice on the evening of 24 March that it became apparent
that he had no plan. He had told Indians only days before that his
government had created a special task force to cushion the economic
distress provoked by the pandemic. He had done no such thing. Among
those who had not heard of the task force’s existence until the moment
it was announced was Nirmala Sitharaman—the person who, according
to Modi, was chairing it. The first budgetary allocation for all of India’s
emergency healthcare needs amounted roughly to Rs 100 for every
Indian. And the stimulus and relief package he pledged was the paltriest
of all the major economies in the world: under 1% of India’s GDP—more
or less the same amount set aside by Modi for the Central Vista project.
Rather than scrap that vanity venture, the prime minister expedited it.
One of Barack Obama’s first acts after being elected to the American
presidency during the worst financial crisis in a century was to cancel a
costly fleet of replacement helicopters ordered by the George W. Bush
administration. Confronted by a once-in-a-century pandemic, the Modi
government’s pressing priority was to set a deadline for the completion
of a palatial new mansion for the prime minister. Nor did the sight of the
greatest human exodus in India’s history since the partition of 1947
prompt the government to cancel its order of a pair of bespoke Boeing
jets to fly our prime servant in safety, comfort and style.
There was no provision for the stranded, the poor, the homeless and the
migrant workers. Holding labourers against their will far away from
home was explained away by one BJP MP as a necessary measure to
“kickstart economic activities”. When the BJP’s 21st-century version of
indentured servitude sparked an outcry, the desperate and destitute
workers were allowed to go home. But in a cruel irony, the publicly
owned Indian Railways, which days before had given Rs 150 crore to
Modi’s “PM Cares” slush fund, collected the full fare from them. The
Congress party has done a lot that is wrong. Giving succour to the poor
in 2020, whatever its motivation, must number among its worthiest
deeds.
And since the prime minister singled out the Congress for special
condemnation, it’s worth contrasting his indifference to the coronavirus

in early 2020 to the Congress-led government’s reaction to swine flu
just over a decade ago. In 2009, the government of the time stockpiled
30 million doses of the antiviral drug Tamiflu, imposed targeted social
distancing, shut down malls and banned gatherings. The response
appeared to many—including me—to be disproportionate to the
disease. But if most of us do not remember any of it, it is because those
precautions succeeded.
Given the magnitude of the tragedy, Modi’s behaviour around the

pandemic was remarkably like Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s around India’s
partition. In the harrowing months following his nation’s birth in 1947,
Jinnah was busy instructing his ambassador to Washington, Mirza
Ispahani, to procure a limousine and aircraft worthy of the governor-
general of the world’s first Islamic republic. “What about my car?” an
impatient Jinnah asked Ispahani in December of that savage year. “I
want the car very badly.”
The distance between the Qaid-e-Azam’s priorities and the plight of the
people he governed could not have been greater. Having realized that
his quest for an ethnoreligious nation had failed—or was bound to fail—
Jinnah sought to bequeath the appearance of a formidable state. He
spawned, instead, a country that knew what it was not but possessed
no idea of what it was. Forged in resentment and rejection of Indian
multiplicity, Pakistan rapidly mutated into a quasi-theocracy in the
hands of a khaki-clad oligarchy that drove its talent abroad, pillaged
those who remained, rewrote history, persecuted heretics, reduced its
minorities to second-tier citizens in law and perpetrated a genocide of
its own citizens.
Modi’s New India is charting an old and rotten course.
***
Coda
Abridgement of great works of literature is intended to enhance their readership.
But I only recently discovered the extent of what is lost in condensation when I
picked up an unabridged edition of War and Peace. Reading the extensive
passages describing in evocative detail the landscapes, the motives of diplomats,
the formation and dissolution of strategy, the excitement of battle, the
wastefulness of war, the innermost longings of an outwardly flamboyant society,
I was staggered—and overcome by a renewed reverence for the sage of Yasnaya
Polyana. I encourage everyone to read it, in whatever form.
About the author

Kapil Komireddi

Kapil is a journalist, book critic and author. His first book, Malevolent
Republic: A Short History of the New India (2019), was published to
critical and commercial acclaim in India, the UK and the US. He has
written from South Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East—
including Syria, Pakistan and Palestine—and his work appears,
among other publications, in The New York Times, The Critic, Foreign
Policy, The Washington Post, The Economist, TIME, CNN, The
Guardian and Le Monde diplomatique. He is a frequent contributor to
The Spectator and an international affairs panellist on Monocle24
radio.
The Morning Context is a research and media company, which tells

stories on tech, business and chaos. We publish a story every
morning from Monday to Saturday. If someone has forwarded this
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Narendra Modi’s New

Copyright © The Morning Context

“The future is certain. It is the past that is

COPYRIGHT © THE MORNING CONTEXT "1

Modi’s performance last Monday, when he sought to blame the

“The struggle of man of power is the struggle of memory against

COPYRIGHT © THE MORNING CONTEXT "2

COPYRIGHT © THE MORNING CONTEXT "3

Given the magnitude of the tragedy, Modi’s behaviour around the

Modi’s New India is charting an old and rotten course.

About the author

COPYRIGHT © THE MORNING CONTEXT "4

The Morning Context is a research and media company, which tells

COPYRIGHT © THE MORNING CONTEXT "5

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