Modi operandi | Dan Mikhaylov
Clusters of people spasmodically wave saffron flags under the blistering heat, anxiously anticipating the moment. The man they so fervently seek on stage to inspire them is but a politician, however, his appearance always signals a special occasion. To pundits, Narendra Modi is a brand, with music, merchandise, and even a biopic dedicated to his imposing persona. To voters, he appears to be a beacon of progress and a mainstay of patriotism. India’s Prime Minister is very popular, arguably more popular than his party; this is a truism. Despite regional upsets, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the nation’s largest right-wing force and his parliamentary tendon decisively triumphed in the 2019 general election.
It defied all laws of political gravity, replenishing its formidable majority with 21 seats and garnering the highest share of votes in its history. Time and time again, the NaMo factor has conjured miracles at the ballot box, enabling the Gujarati-born leader to run campaigns as much on policy as on his personal charisma. It saw him convert a legislative race into a distinctly presidential one.
Similar developments have recently been registered in the West, afar from the world’s largest democracy. Modi’s admirer, Donald Trump, has accomplished an equally fundamental shift in American politics, usurping control in the Republican Party and shifting the media’s attention to his figure. At the same time, our own electoral virtuoso, Boris Johnson, is widely thought to have been instrumental in realising the Tory landslide of 2019, which, just as the victories of his aforementioned counterparts, has profoundly reshaped the country’s political map and twisted group associations with particular parties.
Commonalities do not end there though. While likening Modi to Trump in the press is a comparison as old as Methuselah, many journalists are pointing to their supposed divisiveness or to their commitment to protecting domestic industries, placing Boris in that context is new. In March, The Independent’s Raymond Whitaker wrote an article, in which he argued that Westminster “has more in common with Delhi than first appears”.
To substantiate his opinion, he pointed to simulacra in Johnson’s and Modi’s promises of developing hitherto neglected areas of the UK and India respectively. Likewise, the men’s chief advisors – Dominic Cummings and Amit Shah – both wield considerable influence over what their leaders say and do. Some of the affinity the author ascribes to 10 Downing Street and 7 Kalyan Marg is no doubt far-fetched. He thus concatenates Priti Patel’s deportation of 50 Jamaican-born criminals with the BJP’s crackdown on Kashmir at a cost to the credibility of his overall message. However, even amid such obfuscating, dubious comments, he sheds light on one important thing – that British conservatives may learn from their Indian counterparts’ successes and failures.
How edifying is Modi’s peculiar right-wing vision to British Tories? Prima facie, the vast majority of us would attest to the absence of any lessons to take away from the BJP. Its policies, especially those that make the headlines of international news, are marred in controversy and hardly seem attractive. For instance, though popular at home, the abrogation of Kashmiri statehood exemplifies a backward rather than a forward move as well as an affront on the country’s constitution designed to aggravate sectarian violence which the party’s politicians so eagerly gorge - such is the Western media consensus.
On other occasions, we hear of Modi’s recklessness illustrated by his rapid move to demonetise all ₹500 and ₹1,000 banknotes in 2016. Intended to curtail the shadow economy and mitigate the use of illicit and counterfeit cash, this daredevil act arguably did much more to evaporate savings than to curb illegal transactions, and the GDP growth hit a four-year low that year.
These criticisms notwithstanding, there is still a lot to contemplate and analyse in relation to Indian conservatism: half of the time we receive mere snippets of the bigger picture and our understanding is, therefore, left incomplete. Moreover, the Modi administration’s ideology continues to escape the view of political analysts, who conversely prefer to focus on castigating its reforms. But this article is different. To reverse our ignorance of Modi’s principles and background is precisely its goal. Here, we shall clarify what otherwise seems perplexing and discern what we could borrow from Modi and his movement to benefit our own ideology.
As a starting point, let us turn to the man himself. Of course, it is impossible to cover every aspect of his personality here, whence we recommend you peruse The Modi Effect, by Tony Blair’s ex-advisor and The Guardian’s political commentator, Lance Price. He traces Modi’s journey from a young recruit in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist paramilitary group that undergirded the BJP and still influences its stances on societal issues, to the post of the Gujarati Chief Minister and subsequently the premiership.
The book reveals that this was a rocky road, characterised as much by successes as by contentious stories. Chief among the latter stand the 2002 Gujarat sectarian riots that took the lives of more than one thousand Indians and that blot his otherwise commendable reputation as governor. This is because some accuse him of complicity in those religiously motivated pogroms even in the light of his acquittal by the Indian Supreme Court. Regardless of whom you believe, Modi undeniably matters.
Firstly, he succeeded in creating a second-party system in India, a system where the BJP, which had occupied the prime-ministerial office only in 1996 and from 1998 until 2004, knew no real rivals. Although a respected politico and community leader, his predecessor, Atal Bihari Vajpayee was nowhere near as faddish as Modi. The 69-year old does things differently, hence, his prominence in politics. Besides currying favour with the party’s traditional voters, such as Hindu devotees and entrepreneurs,
Modi has brought technology to the fore. In 2014, his inaugural nationwide contest resulted in a remarkable victory for the BJP. Modi’s saffron-emblazoned conservatives secured 282 seats, thus becoming the first party to form a majority government by itself since 1984 and almost unseating the president of the Indian National Congress, Rahul Gandhi. Much like Donald Trump, but two years before him, the Gujarati maverick pioneered digital campaigning.
He not only criss-crossed the country in person, travelling 300,000 km and attending 5,857 events, but also utilised holographic transmissions to speak to even more people. Once, he addressed 100 different crowds simultaneously, if we are to believe Lance Price. Moreover, he mobilised an army of tech-savvy youths to spread his message online, created his own app, unsurprisingly called NaMo, and formed his own YouTube channel. Needless to add, he is active on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, his fan base outnumbered only by Trump’s following. In short, Narendra Modi ensured technological progress is synonymous with him for as long as he partakes in politics.
This is certainly something Boris should mirror. The advent of information technology, as evidenced by the NYT bestseller The Fourth Revolution has precipitated major political changes. The book’s authors, Adrian Wooldridge and William Micklethwait, suggest that one’s ability to access information from a smorgasbord of sources and to publicise opinions without needing a multi-million pound studio has stripped news networks of their oligopolistic, exclusive right to tell us what and how to think. They definitely remain powerful. We neither have yet ceased nor probably will abandon watching Channel Four or the BBC Panorama just because we now have alternatives. Their pieces’ analytical quality often outweighs the drivel and malarkey of some sketchy YouTube conspiracists, which is why we prefer the former option. However, given the bias in the mainstream press, the arsenal of every politician should include the means to refute groundless accusations and militate against what may eventually determine an electoral outcomes. In other words, a successful politico fights back!
In the same spirit, Modi defies perceptibly unjust criticisms from NDTV, one of India’s main news channels, Trump confronts Jim Acosta, and Boris should also stand up to criticism. Of course, both Modi and Trump are also backed by certain conventional news anchors and opinion-makers: Fox News in the US and Republic TV in India.
Be that as it may, they behave independently from the press and can afford to lose some of that support without major repercussions because they both campaign on their own terms. This is what BoJo should practise as well. Given his personal appeal and charisma, he would easily muster additional support for himself and his party by boosting his presence on social media.
This is not an immediate concern necessarily, since the Tories have recently attained a sweeping electoral victory, and Boris, consciously or not, has emulated Modi’s tendency to make his personal presence felt in every contested seat. However, many of those gains came from non-traditional voters, particularly within the former Red Wall; it is this electorate that has hardly managed to develop lasting bonds to the new Conservative Party, and resultantly, may be up for grabs again in the next election.
As the government relentlessly seeks to retain its trust and balancing it with some tough decisions on the past-pandemic economic recovery, flaunting the Boris factor could be a useful strategy. By fostering a base that specifically respects and endorses Boris, the party may circumvent obstacles and mitigate the effect of unpopular economic measures the aforementioned reconstruction may force upon it. Perhaps, this type of allegiance, unseen in British politics since at least Winston Churchill’s premiership, would even earn Boris mercy for occasional poor policy judgements.
Modi’s politics offers precisely this insight: personality is extremely important. He neither shirks canvassing votes in a presidential style, famously inflating the size of his chest in speeches as a sign of masculinity, nor shuns from promising too much. Vowing to extrapolate the so-called Gujarat model of development to the rest of the country and construct Smart Cities on an industrial scale, he conquered the hearts and minds of plentiful voters. The BJP’s powerful message of building a New India, whose chowkidar (watchman) will be Modi, sent ripples of excitement throughout the country and gave the party a blank cheque.
Even when its policies, however well-intentioned they were, crumbled due to poor results or zealous opposition, most voters seemed forgiving. In 2016, demonetisation proved disastrous to the average Joe, but the working class and rural farmers largely continued to sympathise with Modi. As much as they were hit by that decision, they felt this was a necessary sacrifice to rid India of corruption and illegal activity. After all, the extremely rich, perceived as corrupt and untrustworthy, were hit far worse, and the notion of janata (nation) seemingly took priority over the individual. Devastated financially, they were hardly dejected by that type of economic self-flagellation, nonetheless. Instead, the public focused on Modi’s pledge to benefit the whole nation, epitomised by his Swacch Bharat (Clean India) Mission that has constructed more than 110 million toilets in the country’s most deprived areas.
This idea of putting the nation first, albeit within a capitalist society, is neither opportunistic nor populistic, when emanating from the BJP. One of the organisation’s principal ideologue, M.S. Golwalkar, wrote two books on the concept of Hindutva, or a Hindu nation, in which he explored the aforementioned principle. In his first publication, uninspiringly titled Bunch of Thoughts, he vituperates communism and capitalism, concluding that, owing to their deficiencies, they will “resile from their original stances” and move towards each other. Hence, the era of glasnost in the Soviet Union, and the expansion of the welfare state in capitalist nations. For this reason, he continues, there ought to be a system where “the impermanent exist to serve the permanent”. Under such conditions, capitalism is as much a mechanism to reward merit as it is to advance the riches of the country, i.e. the permanent. According to him, it fosters an atmosphere of harmony, whereas pure, irresponsible capitalism breeds moral degradation and causes states to implode from internal divisions.
Can this be remodelled in Britain? Yes and no. Yes, because we already have the NHS, a testimony to communal unity, which ex vi termini relies on the impermanent tax-payers to help the permanent, the society. Likewise, we have a minimum wage and countless other social security initiatives, established to help create a more harmonious Britain. Furthermore, the idea of expanding this system pervades certain conservative circles. Thus, Phillip Blond’s think tank, ResPublica, calls for the so-called Red Toryism, a radical communitarian traditionalist conservatism, which equally inveighs state and market monopolies. Championing the principles of Catholic distributionism, this entity stresses the need for social solidarity in this epoch of excessive individualism, to be reinforced through state intervention.
In Blond’s view, religious organisations would have been better at fulfilling this role, but attendance at churches is constantly declining. In turn, this compels us to employ the state in this capacity, adopting something akin to the Scandinavian model. That said, the answer is also no. Simply put, there is no way the British electorate would be as tolerant of government failure. If it were to shoot itself in the foot by virtue of a misguided economic policy, the government would hardly encounter magnanimity. Quite the contrary; it would be voted out at the next occasion.
Modi’s aggressive communitarian conservatism should be taken with a pinch of salt. Boris has already ramped up spending in response to the trust received from those residing within the former Red Wall. Resultantly, any more toying with British group feeling should be done with caution.
The information provided in this article may come across as overwhelming; we have tried to condense our policy analysis to the most pertinent aspects of Modi’s ideology and yet do justice to its complexity. At the end, we ask ourselves: can British conservatives benefit from their counterparts in the BJP? We can grasp a thing or two about using technology in campaigning and putting the interests of the permanent, the community we cherish and desire to preserve, from studying how Indians handle those issues. Still, Modi and Boris are not identical, and neither are their countries. Whilst stockpiling Boris’ charisma in the Tory electoral arsenal is conducive to deliver at least in the short run, spending too much on technology is risky. In India, party expenditure laws are poorly enforced, and the press surveys it far less scrupulously. Imagine the kind of uproar Boris would cause by conducting as grandiose a televised rally as those Modi regularly performs!
Evidently, blind imitation of Indian conservatism is both dubious and unrealistic, since it would require a stretch of imagination to equate the Tories with the BJP. Nonetheless, Modi is emblematic of many global tendencies and has trailblazed their development in many respects. For this reason, his ideology must be recognised as influential, and whilst its exact methods may seem alien to us, its technology-loving spirit and propensity to mould capitalist policies with communitarian principles mesh well with Conservative Party’s current direction. Boris Johnson has sought to champion One-Nation Conservatism with words and deeds, and Modi’s steps to unite and reform India overall chime well with the political conjuncture in the UK.
Although Raymond Whitaker’s interpretation is rather far-fetched in its conclusions, it definitely got one thing right. Conservative politics in Britain and India resemble one another today more than they ever have done in the past, and it will be interesting to observe how their convergence unravels in the years to come.
