In terms of their upbringing and ideological formation, no two Indian politicians could be more opposed than Narendra Modi and Indira Gandhi. One witnessed enormous hardship while growing up, the other was raised in an atmosphere of social and economic privilege. One had his worldview shaped by the many years he spent in the Rashtriya Swamaysevak Sangh (RSS), the other was deeply influenced by a father who detested the RSS. One has no family, the other had children and grandchildren. One had to work his way up the ladder of Indian politics, step by step, the other had a lateral entry into a high position purely on account of her birth.
These very different personal biographies notwithstanding, it has long seemed to me that there are some striking similarities in their political styles. Back in February 2013, I wrote in The Hindu that "Neither Mr. Modi's admirers nor his critics may like this, but the truth is that of all Indian politicians past and present, the person Gujarat Chief Minister most resembles is Indira Gandhi of the period 1971-77. Like Mrs. Gandhi once did, Mr. Modi seeks to make his party, his government, his administration and his country an extension of his personality." When this article was published, the Chief Minister of Gujarat was making his national ambitions explicit. Fifteen months later, Narendra Modi became Prime Minister of India, his Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP winning, under his leadership, the first full majority in the Lok Sabha of any party since 1984. Modi's first months in office seemed to confirm the parallels between him and Indira Gandhi. Like she had once done, he cut the other leaders in his party to size, sought to tame the press, and to use the civil services, the diplomatic corps and the investigative agencies as political instruments, and to build a personality cult of himself.
Within a few months of Narendra Modi becoming Prime Minister, the comparison with Indira Gandhi was being made by many other people too. There was talk of an 'undeclared Emergency', even of 'creeping fascism'. I myself had no illusions about the centralizing instincts of the Prime Minister, yet the historian in me was alert to a fundamental way in which the India of 1975 differed from the India of 2014. When the Emergency was imposed by Indira Gandhi, her Congress Party ruled at the centre, and also enjoyed power - on its own or in coalition - in all major states of the Union except Tamil Nadu. On the other hand, when Narendra Modi became Prime Minister, many states of the Union were outside the control of his BJP. My hope therefore was that our federal system would serve as a bulwark against full-blown authoritarianism. In Narendra Modi's first term as Prime Minister, the BJP won elections in some major states while losing elections in other major states. Even after Modi and the BJP emphatically won re-election at the centre in 2019, they could not so easily win power in the states, as the cases of Maharashtra and Jharkhand showed.
The anti-CAA protests strengthened one's faith in the democratizing possibilities of Indian federalism. Large sections of the citizenry rose up in opposition to a discriminatory act that seemed grossly violative of the constitution. The Chief Ministers of several large states were also opposed to the new legislation. This seemed further confirmation that the present was not the past. Indira Gandhi could do what she did only because her party controlled both the centre as well as all the states in India (Tamil Nadu's DMK government having been dismissed a few months after the Emergency was promulgated).
The COVID-19 pandemic has however changed everything. It has given Narendra Modi and his government the opportunity to weaken the federal structure and radically strengthen the powers of the centre vis-a-vis the states. They have used a variety of instruments to further this aim, which include:
1. The further postponement of the disbursal of funds already due to the states as their share of GST collections. These are substantial, amounting to more than Rs 30,000 crores all told. These funds, if released promptly, could greatly alleviate popular distress;
2. The creation of a new fund at the centre, the so-called PM-CARES, which discriminates against the states in that it gives special exemptions (to write off donations as 'Corporate Social Responsibility') that are denied to those who wish to donate instead to the Chief Minister's Fund of their own states. This fund gives the Prime Minister enormous discretionary power in disposing of thousands of crores of rupees as he pleases. The functioning of the fund is shrouded in secrecy, with even the national auditor, the Comptroller and Auditor General, not allowed to audit it;
3. The abolition of the MPLADS scheme, another naked attempt at centralization, disallowing members of parliament from acting to mitigate suffering in their constituencies;
4. The partisan behaviour of Governors seeking to undermine the authority and functioning of non-BJP state governments, as witness the unconscionable delay of the Maharashtra Governor in approving his own Chief Minister's nomination to the legislative council, and the extraordinary language used by the West Bengal Governor against his own Chief Minister ("I can figure out that your entire strategy is crafted to deliberately divert people's attention from your abject failure in combating and containing coronavirus in West Bengal. Your appeasement of the minority community was so explicit and awkward...", etc). It is extremely unlikely that these Governors are acting on their own; far more likely that the BJP High Command wishes them to push its partisan agenda in two major states of the Union where the party currently has no share in government.
What this list (which is merely illustrative, by no means comprehensive) shows is that there seems to be a concerted attempt by the centre to bring states down to their knees. Notably, this cold-blooded misuse of the COVID-19 pandemic to weaken federalism has been accompanied by a systematic attempt to further build up the personality cult of the Prime Minister. Doordarshan, senior cabinet ministers, and the ruling party's IT Cell have all been working overtime to proclaim that only Modi can Save India.
As someone who visited Gujarat often before and after 2002, I had no illusions about Narendra Modi's political style. I knew that he was not the sort of plural, accommodating, reconciling, open-minded leader that our diverse and divided country required. Rather, he believed in total control over his party, his cabinet, his officials, and his state. Hence the comparison I made in February 2013, with that other instinctive autocrat, Indira Gandhi. Even so, I believed that when Modi became Prime Minister, the facts on the ground would serve somewhat to constrain his totalizing and centralizing ambitions.
Between May 2014 and January 2020, this writer, who had both witnessed and researched the Emergency, thought the fact that so many major states were ruled by parties other than the party that ruled at the centre, would save the Republic from the kind of dictatorship that India witnessed between June 1975 and March 1977. This (only slightly) comforting invocation of the past had, however, not reckoned with what was to occur in the future. The ongoing pandemic has provided an opening for the Modi regime to seek to aggressively weaken the functioning of Indian federalism. They must not be permitted to succeed. The states must push back as hard and as best as they can. For, if the experience of the Emergency has taught us anything at all, it is this-that one party, one ideology, and one leader must never again be allowed to successfully impose their will on our gloriously heterogeneous Republic.
(Ramachandra Guha is a historian based in Bengaluru. His books include 'Environmentalism: A Global History' and 'Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World'.)
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