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BY 1971 Indira Gandhi was perched as an empress of Indian democracy. She had established a political cult with no parallel. After about six years of flux in Indian politics, Indira Gandhi had unveiled a one party rule. She had no challengers. She had run her surgical knife on Pakistan. She midwifed birth of Bangladesh with a surgeon’s precision. She lifted the doom from the conscience of millions of Indians who suffered collective national depression following India’s humiliating defeat at the hands of mighty Chinese army in 1962. The Opposition hailed her as ‘Durga’ (symbol of Shakti, power).
Destiny could not have been more kind to Indira Gandhi. She had her firm grips over absolute power. She was the face of India’s resurgence. She effected fundamental changes in Indian democracy and economy. She gave Indian democracy twin legs of secularism and socialism by incorporating them in the Preamble of the Constitution. India firmly embraced an identity of a welfare state.
The mighty lady is arguably the mother bank of ideology of not only her party Congress, but also the whole lot of socialist parties which dot vast swathes of the country. Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru had groomed her politically and ideologically. He shaped his daughter’s worldview. Destiny was much kinder to her, for Indira Gandhi not only grew in the bosom of Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru but was also adored by Mahatma Gandhi.
Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru was an internationalist. He was arguably the father of industrial India. His daughter was a case in contrast. She was more of a nationalist than an internationalist. Her father co-opted industrial world. She shunned them. Her father knocked at the doors of United Nations for solutions to vexed Kashmir issue. She cared the least for any international power. She was uncluttered and shunned lures to romance an international stature. She charted her own course.
Mahatma Gandhi was arguably her ideological father. Nehru dreamt of India having large industries and equitable distribution of wealth. She embraced his ideas in her statecraft. She anchored her politics on the plank of anti-poverty measures. She was no believer in large industries and the free market economy taking care of the poor. She unapologetically disowned Nehruvian economy through industrialisation and instead believed in direct transfer of wealth to poor.
FOUR and a half decades later Narendra Modi is perched as an emperor of Indian politics. Even his political rivals privately admit that Modi has surpassed the 1971 stature of Indira Gandhi. They firmly believe that India is on the cusp of a single party rule for quite a long time. He has eclipsed all his rivals. He has a grip over absolute power. His stature is a notch larger than that of Indira Gandhi of 1971.
Indira Gandhi incidentally had to struggle through her political course, as she was a contemporary of a galaxy of stalwarts not only within the Congress but outside. If Kamraj and Morarji Desai were her challengers in the Congress, she had to politically outweigh leaders like Jayprakash Narayan, Charan Singh, George Fernandes, Atal Bihari Vajpayee et al. But Modi seems to be lucky as he has none to challenge him inside his party and outside as well on a scale as faced by Indira Gandhi.
NARENDRA Modi is also arguably the first non-Congress Prime Minister of India. There were seven before him from non-Congress ranks, including BJP's Atal Bihari Vajpayee. But they all bore strong ideological footprints of Congress and carried the legacy of Indira Gandhi in their thoughts, beliefs and statecraft. Modi stands apart because he carries no Congress baggage in thoughts and actions. He could do so because, he does not belong to New Delhi, which has a character of thinking India being just an aggregate of various bungalows in Lutyens' zone.
In 1991 when Narsimha Rao took over the reign of the country, India was reeling under deep economic crisis. India had to mortgage gold to meet the requirement of current account deficit and pay interest on international borrowings. Rao appointed Manmohan Singh as his finance minister and gave him a template to revive the economy. Singh unleashed a slew of reforms and broke the shackles to put India on the path of free capitalist economy.
A lot of systemic changes were brought in without being conscious of the poor, as the belief was in growth rate and trickle down theory. No doubt growth was achieved, but a vast population were left on the margins, leading to rise of Left Wing Extremism. Most of the analysis have revealed that liberalisation and LWE witnessed parallel growth. Later, when Vajpayee took over, he and his finance minister Yashwant Sinha followed the same path and Indian growth story reached to its zenith (9+ growth).
In 2004, the Vajpayee government and the ruling party launched “India Shining” campaign. But it backfired. The left leaning and socialist forces galvanised against the ruling NDA. Even Congress sided with Left policies and managed to become the nucleus for such forces to dislodge the Vajpayee government.
However, it was a travesty of history that the architect of liberalisation, Dr Manmohan Singh, became the leader of the left leaning group of parties. Singh was anointed the Prime Minister of India. As the Manmohan rule progressed, it had the imprint of Sonia Gandhi and the four left parties with more than 60 seats in Lok Sabha supporting the government. Here again Manmohan Singh did not work on his own template, as was the case when he had been the finance minister. Then he worked on Rao’s template’ and as Prime Minister he worked on a combined template of Sonia Gandhi and Left Parties. Thus began the one decade of India being a ultra-welfare state, as the UPA government was repeated in 2009. Several pro-poor direct transfer and right based policies were put in place. They included like MGNREGA, RTE, RTI and food security act.
Now with Narendra Modi at the helm, it seems the state has drifted from its path of ultra-welfare activities and instead sowing seeds of being an enabler for people to avail benefits of the fruits of development. In case of most of the UPA flagship schemes, Modi did not discontinue, but has showed least interest in them in their implementation. Today nobody is talking about MGNREGA and even if some talks are made, they are all about non-payment of wages to labrourers. Even Right to education seems to have become a non-issue. Right to Information too has become irrelevant as many thousand applications are reported to have been pending in the office of CIC.
In place of these the new government has launched several social sector schemes to empower people living on the margin. But in none of them the state is directly contributing anything. Be it Jandhan Yojna, or Pradhan Mantri Bima Yojna or for that matter Atal Pension Yojana, the basic criteria to avail them is to contribute, though very meager. Therefore, the Modi is government, in the name of welfare, has only been creating platform for people to come and join with their own money and get the benefits of the schemes. And that is the template of an enabler Narendra Modi India is witness to after the 2014 verdict.
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