One Year of Modi Rule : The Acche Din Hype Unravels

The self-congratulatory cacophony generated by the Modi government and the BJP to celebrate the first anniversary of Modi’s 2014 ascent to power makes us wonder if the BJP believes that time stood still for the last one year. Even as the heat wave claims hundreds of lives across the country, large sections of the people reel under the burden of deepening distress and soaring prices, and the opinion polls reflect growing disappointment of the people who had voted Modi to power a year ago, the BJP propagandists have launched a massive campaign patting their own backs. The government has issued a 180 page booklet listing the government’s ‘achievements’, and in the coming days and weeks the country will be bombarded with 200 rallies and 5000 public meetings. It almost sounds like a rerun of the India Shining propaganda blitz which had boomeranged spectacularly in the 2004 elections.

Modi set the tone of this arrogant and absurd hyperbole when addressing the Indian community during his recent trip to China and South Korea, he said till his government came to power NRIs were ashamed to admit that they were Indian. Indians, according to Modi, used to curse themselves for the sins they must have committed in their previous lives to have merited the shame and punishment of being born in India. Back in India, Modi continued in the same tone. Addressing a rally in Mathura on 25 May, Modi said what his government had already performed was a veritable miracle. Announcing the arrival of ‘acche din’, he said only looters, thieves and power brokers were complaining of ‘bure din’ or bad days!

Now in real life, ‘acche din’ has actually become a joke, a metaphor for the misery that most people find themselves subjected to on a daily basis, whether on account of economic distress, callous governance or dysfunctional basic services. The non-implementation of the tall electoral promises made by Modi and his men has become the talking point among the common people across the country. Even in Modi’s own constituency of Varanasi, surveys have revealed widespread disappointment. Apart from some cleaning up operation in two out of Varanasi’s eighty-odd ghats, the residents of this VIP constituency have not experienced any improvement in the first year of the Modi government. A few weeks ago, the agriculture minister of Haryana’s BJP government, who was earlier president of the farmer organisation of the Sangh Parivar, had dubbed farmers committing suicides as cowards. Now Modi calls people complaining of bad days corrupt!

While the people are waiting for the Modi government to fulfil the basic promises Modi and the BJP had made during the 2014 election campaign, the Sangh parivar is busy advancing what it considers its ‘core’ agenda. ‘Ghar wapsi’, ‘love jihad’, sermons to Hindu women to produce ten children, ban on beef and so on and so forth – BJP ministers and MPs have been working overtime to enforce this agenda. During the election campaign Giriraj Singh had voters who did not want Modi to become PM to go to Pakistan. He has found his place in the Modi cabinet. And now Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, another Modi minister asks those who want to eat beef to go to Pakistan! For other items of the ‘core agenda’ like Ram Mandir and removal of Article 370, Amit Shah has asked the people to give 370 seats to the BJP so the BJP could amend the Constitution as it wished.

For all the propaganda blitzkrieg of Modi and his men, the actual experience of the first year of the Modi government will go a long way in exposing three mega myths that have played such a central role in making the BJP the number one party in India. Beyond the core support base of the Sangh Parivar, the myth of the Gujarat model and the so-called Modi magic now evokes growing scepticism. The thesis of the mythical metamorphosis of the BJP into a ‘normal’ rightwing party which will contain, if not shed, the communal agenda is also being questioned by many liberal sections of the middle classes who had thrown their weight behind the BJP in the 2014 elections. And last but not the least, the BJP’s ‘nationalist’ farmer-friendly trader-friendly image has been severely dented with the unmasking of the corporate-encircled FDI-begging real face of Narendra Modi.

For a party like the BJP which has always sought to camouflage its communal agenda as ‘cultural nationalism’, it is indeed revealing that Modi’s first year in office has been overshadowed by the foreign factor – making foreign trips and soliciting foreign investment. As many as eighteen foreign trips claiming two of the twelve months that Modi has been in power have been the highlight of Modi’s first year. And on the economic front, Modi has turned out to be a devout worshipper of FDI. Those who argue that ‘Make in India’ is about creation of jobs and increasing the share of manufacturing in India’s GDP do not tells us why FDI has to be at the centre of this strategy. If job creation and manufacturing growth were the real objective, why is the government systematically dismantling the public sector and privileging FDI and private corporate participation to the neglect of the labour intensive small and medium enterprises that can be the real platform for creation of jobs?

It is significant that while the BJP leaders were busy congratulating themselves on the first birthday of the Modi government, peasants, workers and students were out on the streets against the government’s policies. The people’s experience of the first year of the Modi government will be the biggest ammunition as we take on the corporate-communal offensive of the BJP in the coming days.

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