Malevolent India

 

Book Review

Title: Malevolent Republic

Author: K. S. Komireddi

Publisher: Context, Chennai, 2020

Pages: xxxiii + 228       Price: Rs399

‘A Short History of the New India’ is the subtitle of this relatively short book. In ten tersely titled chapters [e.g., ‘Erosion,’ ‘Surrender,’ ‘Decadence’], the book presents just five prime ministers of India: Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh, and Narendra Modi. The history of a country is largely a creation of its prime leader. While the first four PMs mentioned above receive one chapter each, the entire second part of the book [6 chapters] is dedicated to Modi and the pathetic if not pathological history he has been forging.

With Indira Gandhi started the erosion of the high principles followed by the former leaders. Indira knew the game of politics and played it shrewdly. The emergency and Bhindranwale were her serious mistakes. Her son Sanjay was another. Komireddi is of the opinion that Indira was glorified rather hyperbolically by history.

Her Congress successors weren’t much better either. Rajiv Gandhi was not the “redeemer prime minister” as he is projected in liberal lore. He was a suave young man who loved to wear designer denims, Gucci shoes, and a Cartier wristwatch. He would have liked to live a private and affluent life. But destiny hurled him into politics. He was quite the Mr Clean as he came to be acclaimed. Yet he lacked strength of character. He buckled before religious populism. His grandfather’s distinguished secularism was strangled by him mercilessly.

Narasimha Rao was a polymath and a polyglot. He had a soft corner for the right wing in India and let L K Advani’s nationalist vendetta march “from Somnath, where a majestic Hindu temple had repeatedly been ransacked by Muslim invaders, to the ancient town of Ayodhya, where the founder of the Mughal empire had erected a mosque by bringing down a Hindu temple.” Rao had got an assurance from Advani that the Babri Masjid would not be demolished. But Advani “was the most poisonous figure in Indian politics at this time.” [All quotes are from the book under review.]

Advani’s blatant betrayal haunted Rao for the rest of his life, says the book. Rao knew that people like Advani [as are now Modi and his fans] “who search for personal consolation in bloody retributions against the past … do not bring history to a terminus: they endow it with an insoluble fury.”

Rao revolutionised the country’s economy by liberalising it and putting an end to the License Raj. He put India on a progressive path at least where the economy was concerned. Yet he had a sad end. The Congress refused to give his mortal remains an honourable place in Delhi’s historic ghat. “His body was flown back to Hyderabad, where it lay in state in an empty hall. His funeral was poorly guarded… (S)tray dogs tore at the remains of his partially cremated body.”

Manmohan Singh continued the economic liberalisation set in motion by Rao. But the economic surge of the country did not bring any remarkable ‘trickle-down’ effect to the poor and the marginalised. “16.000 farmers killed themselves every year for all but two years that Singh was in office.” Lands belonging to the Dalits and tribals were taken over by the government and handed to the corporate sector in the name of development. The poor people who lost their lands and livelihoods protested only to be fired upon by the police. They had no choice but become Maoists. Manmohan Singh declared Maoism the greatest internal threat to India without ever bothering to understand his own role in the creation of Maoists.

Manmohan Singh lacked vertebrae, according to the author of this book. He focused on GDP and left politics to Sonia Gandhi and her men. A lot of scandals broke out during Singh’s period. Those who profited from Singh’s inefficiency “were Muslim extremists in Pakistan and Hindu supremacists in India.” The corporate honchos who benefited praised him “as wise, thoughtful, visionary, compassionate.” In reality, however, Singh was “totally isolated from (the) people.”

K.S. Komireddi

And then came the people’s hero: Narendra Modi.

Modi has been the most disastrous Prime Minister that India has had, according to this book. His impact on the country’s socio-political fabric had been so pernicious that it will take many generations to rectify the “pan-national cancer”. The titles of the six chapters dedicated to Modi are revealing themselves: Cult, Chaos, Terror, Vanity, Seizure, and Disunion.

Modi’s royal march to Lok Kalyan Marg started with a genocide in his home state in 2002 when he was the chief minister. He knows how to play the sectarian card and has been playing it dexterously for two decades now. He knows how to make it look something else, however: development, for example.

“In the minds of many Indians, Gujarat came to be imagined as a subcontinental Shangri La,” says the author. The truth was something else altogether. “People in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Kerala enjoyed a superior standard of life from birth to death than their Gujarati counterparts. If you were a non-Hindu, if you happened to be a Muslim, Gujarat was a pit of horror and humiliation.” Modi’s Gujarat was somewhat like Putin’s Russia, says Komireddi. It was “a place where circumstances fell into the habit of becoming mysterious when it came to the departure of the leader’s enemies.” Later the whole of India became such a place when Modi became the Prime Minister.

A month after Modi became PM, the presiding judge of the Supreme Court was removed from office in order to save Amit Shah from a murder case. Six months later, Judge Loya died in “mysterious circumstances” the morning after spending a night at a government guest house. Two of his friends also dropped dead soon: one from the top of a building, another on a train. Loya’s successor, M B Gosavi, dropped the charges against Shah within three weeks of being given the charge of the case.

Countless people have been victimised by Modi’s thuggery. If Ehsan Jafri, an MP, could be dragged out of his home and gashed and burned alive in spite of repeated attempts to contact Modi during the Gujarat riots, what makes anyone think he or she will remain unharmed? The author asks citing many more examples. “If Aamir Khan … can be unpersoned; if Gauri Lankesh … can be shot dead; if Ramachandra Guha … can be stopped from lecturing; if Naseeruddin Shah … can be branded a traitor; if Manmohan Singh … can be labelled an agent of Pakistan; … if a young woman can be stalked by the police machinery of the state because Modi has displayed an interest in her – what makes the rest of us think we will remain untouched and unharmed?”

Modi is a malevolent narcissistic dictator who pretends to be a benevolent nationalist with a patriarchal beard whose length is the only thing that keeps improving under his watch and ward. All the endless foreign tours (putting an end to them was perhaps the only good thing that happened because of Covid-19) did no good to anyone. Foreign institutional investors withdrew their money from India, all our neighbours began to despise us, China has taken possession of Indian territories cocking a snook at Modi’s chest-thumping, time-tested friends like Nepal and Bhutan are alienated…

All significant institutions have been vitiated by Modi. The armed forces have been politicised – something which no former PM ever did. The Reserve Bank has lost its autonomy perilously. Universities have been enslaved to mendacity. The Election Commission has been enervated beyond recognition. Worst of all, the Supreme Court has become a handmaid of the government. The media has become a mere lapdog. “Indira Gandhi shackled the press,” says the author. “Modi co-opted it.”

The author illustrates all his claims with plenty of examples. That is one of the best things about this book. It is indeed a history to that extent. Otherwise, it is an incisive critique of the Prime Ministers mentioned, especially Modi. Towards the end of the book, the author shows why Kashmir will never again feel a part of India. Of course, Modi is likely to annihilate the Kashmiri Muslims and create a Hindu Kashmir. He might try similar things in other parts too. The South is already voicing dissent and making secessionist grunts.

“Modi has drawn out the very worst in many Indians,” Komireddi says in one of the concluding pages of his first book. The biggest disservice contributed by Modi is that he has distorted India and it will take a long, very long, period after him to redeem the goodness within the country.

The book is highly recommended to all Indians who can read elite English. Komireddi’s style is not simple. Sample this sentence, for instance: “Is the capacious imagination of Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism who envisioned a socialist ‘New Society’ for all inhabitants of Palestine, disgraced or upheld when Modi – forged in an ideology that lionises the tormentors of Herzl’s people – mouths platitudes about democracy with Netanyahu, an ethno-religious bigot whose anti-democratic politics are awash in the venom of Dr Geyer, the villain of Herzl’s foundational text on Zionism?”

It is worth enduring that convolutedness of style especially if you are a Modi bhakt. The book may open your eyes and thus you can be redeemed. Your redemption is the country’s redemption in the long run. If you are not a Modi bhakt but would like to take a critical look at your country’s prime ministers, that’s a good idea and here is the right book.