POLITICAL AFFAIRS

“INDIAN DEMOCRACY IS NOT JUST IN CRISIS,” Pratap Bhanu Mehta announced from a lectern at the India Today Conclave in early March, “but there is a deep, deep diminishing of hope at this juncture compared to five years ago or perhaps ten years ago.” Mehta was impassioned, delivering his verdict on a half-decade of the rule of Narendra Modi. “The last five years have been a mutilation of the Indian soul,” he said. “They stand for everything that is un-Indian,” and “against every promise that this democracy gave to each one of its citizens.”

“All the big repositories of hope we had accumulated over the last ten [or] fifteen years—India is at the cusp of structural transformation, India will, in a sense, reach a new stratosphere of growth and inclusion and job creation—I think all of those expectations have been deeply disappointed,” Mehta elaborated. “Religion, that very thing that behooves us to transcend our identity, is being reduced to the identity that marks you, for which you will be targeted,” and “nationalism is being used to divide people.” The expected purpose of the production of knowledge, he suggested, was no longer the pursuit of truth, but “to relieve you of the burden of thinking altogether.” Even “the act of speaking has become a dangerous act.” What will be left of civility, he asked, when those in the highest positions of authority empower those who threaten and intimidate. If the looming general election did not deliver a reconfiguration of power, he predicted, Indian democracy faced great peril.

Here was Mehta claiming the moral high ground—one of the country’s most-read public thinkers, a man considered a star of Indian liberalism, fulfilling the intellectual’s responsibility to deliver uncomfortable truths. And yet, Mehta failed in another intellectual duty—that of self-reflection. Nowhere in his speech did he offer a candid mea culpa.

Prior to the 2014 general election, Mehta, in his widely read column in the Indian Express but also elsewhere, was busy deflecting concerns for the future of Indian democracy in the event that Modi became prime minister, and undermining those who questioned the politician’s record. As early as in December 2012, after Modi secured a fresh term as the chief minister of Gujarat, Mehta published a piece titled “A Modi-fied politics.” In it, he weighed in on the politician’s eligibility for national leadership, and addressed the persistent criticism of Modi for having watched over anti-Muslim pogroms in his state in 2002, soon after he first took charge of it. “You can look at the convictions of Modi’s cabinet colleagues and point to those as proxy proof of his culpability,” Mehta wrote. Among those colleagues was Maya Kodnani, Gujarat’s minister for women and child development until 2009, who was later given a life sentence for organising a massacre in 2002. (The Gujarat High Court granted bail to Kodnani in 2014, shortly after Modi became prime minister, and acquitted her last year.) But, Mehta added, “you can also look at them and wonder why so many Congress cabinet ministers still have not been made to answer for 1984”—when Congress leaders led anti-Sikh pogroms in Delhi. “The point is not to use 1984 to politically exonerate Modi. The point is that it is hard to attack evil when we so widely condone it in other contexts.”

This was a roundabout way of saying what Modi’s defenders have always said when confronted with his bloody legacy—that all those who point it out are Congress minions. Mehta wrote that “those worried about Modi need to set their own house in order,” and that “attacks on him have a self-incriminating quality.” The apparent suggestion was that it was best not to criticise Modi at all. This approach also ignored the fact that Modi’s critics included people who had long condemned the Congress’s evasion of responsibility for 1984.

“Modi is not so much a three dimensional character as an idea,” Mehta wrote.

He represents a longing for centralisation in an age of dispersion, decisiveness in a milieu of indecision, growth amidst a fear of stagnation and government in the face of raucous democracy. He is not adorned with elevated liberal values, or a deep concern for democratic diversity. But he may still prove a rallying point against a decaying plutocracy.

… But Modi’s path to a greater national role is still fraught. … No one can hope to govern India if they are incapable of a statesman-like synthesising capacity. No one can govern India for long if they make minorities feel insecure. … Do you trust the logic of Indian democracy to, in the end, soften the most congenital of prejudices? Or do you fear that democracy will give them free rein?

This was already a step beyond the evasion of the pogroms. Mehta’s style allowed him a studied deniability—note his reliance on generality and rhetorical questions, the subjective interpretations masked as observations of popular trends—but, in effect, he made the case for Modi’s further rise. He conceded, just as Modi would have wanted, that the politician was to be judged not on his actual record, but rather on his desired brand—a brand that made him out to be an economic miracle-worker, a forward-thinking strongman, a one-man solution to all of India’s ills. Mehta encouraged an extreme faith in the strength of the Indian democratic system, a belief that its institutions and conventions would inevitably bend Modi to their demands, instead of Modi bending them to his. The unspoken corollary here was that those averse to this view were just incurable cynics, whom anyone of reasonable mind could ignore. Also implied was a conviction that Modi could and would radically transform himself, if only voters forgave his past transgressions and gave him a chance. This required Mehta