Less than half way through it’s 5-year term in power, PM Narendra Modi’s administration is confronting a series of political and economic challenges that it appears to have been ill-prepared for. In recent months the right-wing BJP’s mandate hit a road bump when the party performed poorly in important regional elections, slowing Mr. Modi’s legislative agenda. The BJP is allied with “Hindutva” organizations that espouse a variety of social and economic aims. This is a rough approximation of the GOP’s alliance with evangelical christian and conservative organizations. Here’s how the FT begins a long article outlining the mixed record of Modi’s BJP government to deliver economic growth and boost manufacturing in India:
The stage was set for a triumphant relaunch of Make in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s big push to transform the nation into a manufacturing powerhouse — until, that is, the stage itself burst into flames. [...]
No one was killed, but the hurried evacuation was hardly the start Mr. Modi wanted, especially when it turned out the stage was made in India.
Four important protests have taken the central and state governments by surprise over the past year:
- Last summer, in Modi’s home-state of Gujarat, younger members of the Patel community (relatively well-off farmers) demanded “reserved” seats for government jobs and universities. The reservations are meant for disadvantaged communities. They organized via social-media and were led by a 22 year old named Hardik Patel who called for a “youth revolution”. Mr. Patel was charged with “sedition” in October after numerous detentions.
- In the North-Western state of Punjab, cotton crops failed last year due to a whitefly epidemic that was variously blamed on monocultures, spurious pesticides and the overuse of chemical pesticides leading to resistance and the absence of natural predators like spiders. The epidemic impacted Monsanto’s Bt cotton, a GM (genetically modified) product that Indian farmers have adopted over the past 15 years. 95% of India’s cotton crop is now GM and the epidemic highlights persistent questions about the economic viability of expensive GM seeds and associated pesticides for relatively poor farmers. In a pattern that is familiar from crop/market failures in other parts of India, farmers deep in debt have committed suicide. Throughout the fall, protesters held sit-ins on train tracks, disrupting vital train traffic for days, while others staged sit-ins in market towns, forcing closures of commodity markets. The farmers are demanding monetary compensation for losses and the central government has announced a revised crop insurance initiative. The protests were exacerbated by seemingly unrelated incidents where copies of Sikh holy books were desecrated.
- Last month, in Haryana, younger members of the Jat community made a demand strikingly similar to that led by Hardik (who has achieved single name status in India). Protesters damaged a major canal feeding Delhi’s water supply, millions of residents had no water for days and schools and businesses across the region closed for days in response to the protests. The army was called in to control the protests and repairs have begun on the canal. Meanwhile, Delhi water purification plants are still operating at 50% of normal flow, and trucks are providing water to many impacted areas. The Haryana government appears to have caved in to the protesters and will offer reservations to the Jat caste. The central government has committed to examining national reservations for Jats.
- Last month, members of the student union at Jawaharlal Nehru University (a bastion of left-leaning liberalism), held a demonstration on the anniversary of the execution of Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri man accused of the terror attack on India’s parliament in 2001. The head of the student union along with four others was arrested and charged with “sedition”. India’s British colonial rulers imprisoned MK Gandhi using the same charge. Student protesters challenged the legality of the arrests almost immediately and students went on strike at JNU within days. The youth wing of Mr. Modi’s right-wing BJP party was the first to complain about the student union’s protest. Since then, BJP supporters have taken to the streets to demand anyone expressing “anti-national” sentiment be punished severely. Gadflys have filed civil suits demanding the leader of the opposition party (Rahul Gandhi) and the Chief Minister of Delhi also be charged with sedition for visiting JNU and expressing sympathy with the student union. Many believe the outrage has been orchestrated to distract attention from mixed results under Mr. Modi’s administration.
The JNU arrests have sparked a broader debate about how antiquated laws are used to suppress speech and compromise the right to free expression in India. Non-Indian professors and writers, including Noam Chomsky, Orhan Pamuk and Mira Nair published an open letter opposing the arrests:
From the reports of a large number of witnesses and the most highly respected journalists in the country, these are the known facts that no impartial observer denies: In a student meeting, acting well within the rights he possesses by the law of the land, Mr. Kumar spoke critically of the BJP government’s policies. On the previous day, at some other event, which he had no part in organising and at which he did not speak, a handful of other students, not even identifiable as students of the university, were shouting slogans about the rights of Kashmiris to independence from Indian military oppression over the last many decades. Mr. Kumar, whose speech (widely available on a video) cannot in any way be connected with the slogans uttered on the previous day, was nonetheless arrested for ‘anti-national’ behaviour and for violating the sedition laws against the incitement to violence. Since there is no evidence to establish these charges, we can only conclude that this arrest is further evidence of the present government’s deeply authoritarian nature, intolerant of any dissent, setting aside India’s longstanding commitment to toleration and plurality of opinion, replicating the dark times of an oppressive colonial period and briefly of the Emergency in the mid-1970s.
These are tumultuous events, even for a raucous democracy like India. They can overwhelm us in their variety and distinctiveness. I’d like to step back and look at the major forces impacting political and economic life in India today which I believe help explain these events.
Reservations
Like many other places, India has a long and terrible history of discrimination against groups of people based on caste, color, religion. Much of the motivation for such discrimination is economic exploitation, of labor or to grasp resources from other groups. In an effort to correct past injustices, and to contain the fears of various minorities, independent India maintained and extended a caste/religious quota system the British colonial regime had established. The incentives were very much the same. After all, Indians at a distance from the seat of power in Delhi have considered their rulers disconnected for many centuries. Quotas helped ensure each province, caste, community felt it was getting its own share. They helped the relatively weak center hold. Quotas also helped redress the historic exclusion of many groups from the halls of intellectual and political power. Much like Church masters in Europe, India’s brahmin caste controlled knowledge and its transmission. In a democracy with equal voting rights, which remarkably India is, this is no longer tenable. “Lower castes” far outnumber higher ones. So India has an elaborate quota system meant to “reserve” spaces in universities, government jobs and many other spheres. You can think of it as affirmative action on steroids.
With rapid urbanization comes the breakdown of strictly enforced caste distinctions. Controlling contact, vocation, wealth and social status is relatively easy in villages that have not changed much over centuries. It is far more difficult in an urban environment. The natural nudge towards meritocracy that the anonymity of cities affords has made the reservation system look antiquated to many middle class Indians in larger towns and cities. The perspective of those still living in village or small towns is very different.
To add to this, India has undergone a population explosion over the past few decades. Over 65% of the population is under 35, and 50% is younger than 25. All these people need to be absorbed into the workforce. Agricultural pursuits cannot support the standards of living most Indians desire. The competition for education and steady jobs becomes intense under such conditions.
The Patel and Jat protests are driven by young men angry over the lack of such jobs and work opportunities. Their ire is directed at the “reserved” seats outside of their reach because they belong to “higher” castes. Looking around and seeing limited opportunities, they don’t feel like “higher” anything, ergo the protests and backlash at reservations.
The Jat protests in Haryana echo the demands of the Patel community (also small scale farmers) in Gujarat. That protest, led by 23 year old Hardik Patel, shocked the Indian political establishment when he managed to gather crowds in the tens of thousands. What induced the most fear though, was that this happened in the state that India’s Prime Minister, the hard-right BJP-ite, Narendra Modi is from. Largely organized over social media, this protest movement has left India’s aged political class scrambling for cover.
The reservation system is undeniably less than perfect. Many of the best opportunities are taken by relatively wealthy members of disadvantaged groups. There is a fair amount of identity fraud as well, particularly when it comes to university seats, with students paying for false certificates stating they are part of “scheduled castes/tribes”. These criticisms are not unique to the reservation system however. Weak enforcement and institutions leave most of the Indian state susceptible to similar corruption. Reservations and quotas have been consistently used by politicians to maintain the loyalty of specific groups by creating “vote banks” in the Indian parlance. Despite these imperfections, the reservation system has been a lifeline for many individuals from groups that have faced enormous and persistent discrimination, often for centuries.
How center and state governments manage to navigate reform of the reservation system could determine whether these protests spill out of control and the violence escalates (over a dozen deaths have already been reported in riots and the ensuing crackdowns). The political stakes are enormous. The BJP-led NDA alliance suffered a humiliating defeat in the last year’s Bihar state elections, largely driven by the understanding that they would seek to weaken the reservation system. Bihar is a relatively poor state with a large population eligible for reservations.
Manufacturing/Economic progress
Mr. Modi’s government was handed an extraordinary mandate in the April 2014 elections. The BJP led NDA (National Democratic Alliance) coalition won an outright majority in the lower house of Parliament. India has had coalition governments for long stretches over the past few decades, so such a victory was a surprise to many. The upper house of Parliament, the Rajya Sabha is smaller with staggered 6-year terms (modeled on the US Senate). The BJP has a much smaller presence there and some of its boldest programs have been stymied in the Rajya Sabha.
The BJP’s enormous victory was driven by two factors. The first was fatigue over the center-left Congress led United Progressive Alliance which had governed for the past 10 years. Equally important was the BJP’s platform, to deliver industrial jobs on a national scale, led by Mr. Modi who was widely believed to have accomplished this in Gujarat. There are numerous caveats to the “Gujarat miracle”, including declining measures of broader well-being and childhood health. But there was something to Mr. Modi’s claim that Gujarat saw a growth spurt.
Facilitating such a growth spurt at the national level has proved much harder to achieve. Mr. Modi’s
government has rolled out a media-ready slogan, “Make in India”, complete with a website and beautiful graphics, but large industrial gains remain elusive. The Taiwanese electronics assembler Foxconn announced a $5bn investment to build factories in India, and Apple confirmed earlier this year that some models of iPhones would be made in the country and perhaps some R&D done there too. Emerson Electric has announced they will build four additional factories and R&D centers in India.
Even though these initiatives sound impressive, they are drops in the bucket when you consider the scale of India’s workforce. Over 10 million young people join the workforce in India each year. They far outnumber older Indians retiring from jobs. It is also not clear that high-tech industrial factories, which utilize enormous levels of automation will create substantial numbers of jobs.
India has a large internal market and a sizable service sector. Economic growth should be 7% this year, and if certain institutional barriers were lowered, that might right even higher. Part of what suppresses growth is the fractured state of the Indian economy and government. There is a maze of local regulations and taxes, often poorly enforced or ripe for corruption. India has no version of the interstate commerce clause. The plethora of bans on various products in different regions (alcohol in particular) creates great consternation.
And then when you’re done with all of that, you have to consider what will happen to India’s 100 million largely small-scale, largely middle-aged farmers, many of whom who lack the skills to perform modern industrial jobs.
Free Speech and suppression of “anti-national” speech
Here’s how the NY Times chose to cover the JNU arrests and the protests they’ve sparked:
In all likelihood, the protest would have passed like the others, except that on this occasion, a television station broadcast footage from the event that it said showed the protesters shouting, “Long live Pakistan.” Equally offensive to many Indians, the students had gathered to express support for Muhammad Afzal, a Kashmiri militant executed for a 2001 suicide attack on India’s Parliament in which nine people were killed.
Apparently, the twin insults were more than India’s newly empowered authorities from the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., could stand. Three days later, the president of the university’s student union was arrested on charges that included sedition.
Since the arrest, the B.J.P., with its strong Hindu nationalist roots, has gone on the offensive, casting itself as the defender of Indian patriotism. It has organized a countrywide campaign against the protesters, holding marches and rallies to defend “Mother India.” At one, in West Delhi, B.J.P. workers shouted, “The traitors of the nation, we will shoot them.”
The BJP is joining a long line of Indian governments on both the left and right that have employed colonial era laws to undermine the freedom of expression supposedly guaranteed to Indian citizens in the constitution and to undermine constitutional limits on their power in general.
What is interesting here is that the debate over freedom of speech seems to have burst into the open. It may not be at the top of the agenda for younger, politically active Indians, but it is there. This line from Kanhaiya Kumar’s speech to other JNU students after his release is being widely quoted:
“We want freedom in India, not freedom from India”
The Indian government’s restrictions on free speech far exceed anything that might be considered legal in the US. In an earlier life, I expended a lot of time on Salman Rushdie and the suppression of Satanic Verses (through most of the 1990s, I maintained a website about him). In the process I got increasingly more disillusioned about legal protections for free speech in India The Indian government has retained numerous laws from the British-era civil and criminal codes which limit speech that is believed to disrupt “public order” or considered an offense to “decency and morality”. Indian politicians have a special sensitivity towards works that are believed to denigrate religious figures, and are quick to suppress them, ostensibly to avoid unrest. Since god-men abound in India, and organizing a violent protest takes hardly any work, creating “public disorder” is relatively simple. Breaking a few windows while ostensibly outraged over a work of art or a book invariably leads to a ban of the offending work. The Supreme court of India has occasionally struck down such bans, but the threat of violence often prevents booksellers or businesses from carrying the physical works. Since internet access in India is relatively unfettered, the bans are in practice, ineffective. In some cases, such protests are meant to drum up outrage and support from particular groups around election time.
That is largely what seems to be happening here as I see it. Mr. Modi’s right-wing government (along with its Hindutva allies) continues to drum up patriotic and religious fervor to rally supporters hoping these sentiments will prop them up if their campaign promise to deliver “acche din” (good times) doesn’t materialize.