On August 6, 2019, I was having coffee with a group of colleagues at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. We were discussing the abrogation, the previous day, of Article 370 in Kashmir. One of the younger members at the table, a computer scientist, remarked: “What we have now is not Modi 2.0, but Shah 1.0.” It was, of course, the new home minister who had planned and piloted the downgrading of India’s only Muslim-majority state. Perhaps to see this as “Shah 1.0” was an exaggeration, but now there was little question that Amit Shah was not just the second-most powerful man in government but the only minister with any real authority and independence of action apart from the prime minister himself.
The Modi-Shah jugalbandi has had its precedents. Consider the partnership, in government, between Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel in the early years of independent India. While the poisonous polemics of contemporary politics represents them as rivals and adversaries, in truth they were friends, colleagues, and co-workers. Amidst the ruins of Partition, faced with the challenges of scarcity and privation, conflict and division, a united and democratic India might never have come into being had Nehru and Patel not worked together. Patel played the leading role in uniting India territorially, by bringing the princely states on board, modernising the administrative system, taming the violent extremists of the Hindu Right and a communist Left, and getting a recalcitrant Congress to support the process of Constitution-making being directed by B.R. Ambedkar. At the same time, Nehru played the leading role in uniting India emotionally, by assuring equal rights to religious and linguistic minorities and to women, and by energetically advocating universal adult franchise in the face of bitter elite opposition to it.
To be sure, Nehru and Patel had their differences, yet they worked heroically to submerge them in the larger national interest. It is also true that they had the support of remarkably able ministers like Ambedkar and of competent civil servants. Nonetheless, historical scholarship has authoritatively demonstrated the central, indeed defining, role their partnership played in forging a nation from its fragments. (Apart from my own India after Gandhi, readers might wish to consult Rajmohan Gandhi’s scrupulously researched biography of Vallabhbhai Patel.)
After Patel died in December 1950, and Ambedkar resigned the following year, Nehru towered over all other figures in the cabinet, which may have been a mixed blessing. The next duopoly to define Indian politics emerged only in the late 1960s, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi appointed the former diplomat, P.N. Haksar, as her principal secretary. Haksar quickly became more powerful than any of Mrs Gandhi’s cabinet ministers. Between 1970 and 1975, he was her right-hand man and most influential adviser. He played a role in planning the prime minister’s finest hour — the liberation of Bangladesh — and in promoting high-quality science in such vitally important spheres as agriculture and space. On the negative side, it was also Haksar who was instrumental in designing Mrs Gandhi’s damaging economic policies of centralisation and control.
In 1975, Haksar was cast aside in favour of the prime minister’s second son. The partnership between Indira and Sanjay Gandhi was responsible for the country’s descent into authoritarianism through the suppression of civil liberties, the censorship of the media, the taming of the judiciary, making the bureaucracy and police subservient to mother and son, and the jailing of all political opponents. And unlike the partnership between Indira Gandhi and P.N. Haksar, it had no redeeming features at all.
The next significant partnership to emerge in government was between P.V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh, prime minister and finance minister in the years, 1991-1996. Rao and Singh together helped liberate the country from the license-permit-quota raj, setting in motion three decades of steady economic growth that has since made a major dent in poverty, created a large middle class, and enhanced India’s stature in the world.
Next came the partnership between Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani. Through the 1980s and 1990s, they worked together to make the Bharatiya Janata Party the major national challenger to the Congress Party. When the BJP was in office between 1998 and 2004, Vajpayee served as prime minister and Advani as home minister. They continued the path of economic liberalisation set in motion by Rao and Singh, helped along by well-qualified cabinet colleagues such as Yashwant Sinha and Jaswant Singh. Meanwhile, the fact that they could rule only as part of a multi-party coalition meant that the majoritarian tendencies of the sangh parivar were not given absolutely free play. (The Vajpayee-Advani jugalbandi has been analysed in recent works by Vinay Sitapati and Abhishek Choudhary). In 2004, the BJP unexpectedly lost power. For the following decade, the country was ruled by a multi-party coalition with the Congress as the dominant partner. Once more, two individuals exercised more authority than all the others: the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi. Directed by Singh, the country’s economic progress continued to be impressive; guided by Sonia and her National Advisory Council, valuable attempts were made to erect a social security net for the poor. These gains of the partnership were unfortunately offset by a lack of clarity as to with whom the real locus of authority lay. It should have of course been the prime minister; yet by nature Singh was timid and risk-averse, and allowed Sonia Gandhi far too much say in matters properly under his domain alone (such as education policy).
And now, in Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, we have the most recent of what by my count is the seventh case of a duopoly in our politics, whereby two individuals and their partnership have come to play a vital role in the affairs of India and Indians. In terms of time, this is the most enduring of all the jugalbandis discussed here. Modi and Shah worked closely together in Gujarat politics between 2002 and 2014, and in national politics since 2014. In this period, they have never lost political power; indeed, they have expanded their power, first by making Gujarat a one-party state and then by expanding the BJP’s footprint all over India.
When considered in terms of political longevity and political success, then the Modi-Shah partnership looks impressive. Yet if one looks at how they have achieved power, and what they have done once in power, their record is much darker. To achieve power, they have broken rival parties by a mixture of coercion and bribery, intimidated the press and made it a vehicle of personal and party propaganda, tamed the judiciary, used draconian measures to put dissenters (including non-violent dissenters) in prison, weakened Indian federalism, and compromised the integrity of previously independent public institutions (and of the Election Commission of India above all). After coming to power, they have favoured a few select capitalists (including two from their home state), driven away foreign investors, failed to generate employment in manufacturing, politicised scientific research, and devastated our forests, water, air and soil, these measures collectively undermining the future economic prospects of the country.
The damage done to our democratic fabric and the stalling of our economic rise by the Modi-Shah jugalbandi are worrisome enough. And we have in addition the continuing attacks on our traditions of social and cultural pluralism overseen and even orchestrated by them. Wherever the BJP is in power, Muslims are marginalised and humiliated. They are effectively made second-class citizens, without a voice, living on the sufferance of the majority community. As noted in an earlier column in these pages, under Modi and Shah India is closer to being a Hindu Pakistan than at any previous time in its history.
I have been a university teacher, where I had to assign grades — A+, A, A- down to F — to students taking the courses I taught. I am also a cricket nut, accustomed to making lists of, for example, the greatest bowlers of all time, ranked 1, 2, 3 down to 10. I will here resist assigning numbered grades to the seven jugalbandis featured in this column, or ranking them in order of positive achievement. Yet so far as one can judge, the verdict of history will be that the first of these partnerships was unquestionably the finest and most constructive, and the third and the seventh probably the most damaging and destructive.
ramachandraguha@yahoo.in