12 Special reportIndia The EconomistOctober 26th 2019
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n a smalltown in Gujarat in the early 1960s, the teenage son of a
local grocer staged a school play. It was about a Dalit mother
whose son falls ill. No doctor will treat the “untouchable” child.
Even a priest shoos away the woman when she begs for the flowers
that worshippers offer to the gods, which are said to have healing
powers. At last he relents and hands her a single yellow bud.
The young playwright was Narendra Modi and the story gives
an early hint at his desire to improve the lot of India’s most down-
trodden. The problem is that, even though he now has the power to
do much more than hand out flowers, he still seems to prefer sym-
bol over substance.
That is not to say that the lives of dalits have not improved. In
Sapawada, a village near Mr Modi’s home town, half a dozen Dalit
families share a narrow alley. Ramesh, a day labourer, says that be-
ing an untouchable used to be brutal. Now, though, Dalit women
are seldom molested or kidnapped. Their children have long since
been allowed to go to the village temple and government school.
Yet they are still told to sit at the back of class and ask no questions,
so they fall behind. Other streets in the village have piped water,
and toilets too, except for the dalits’ lane, which relies on wells and
the neighbouring fields. “They still expect us to do demeaning
work like removing carcasses,” says Ramesh. The nearby Honda
and Suzuki plants hire dalits only for cleaning jobs.
Across the country and up and down the caste scale, the experi-
ence of progress is similar. Everywhere there is improvement, but
much hardship and injustice remains. More dramatically than in
America or even China, India’s new wealth has accumulated dis-
proportionately at the very top of the pile. Asia’s richest man, Mu-
kesh Ambani, lives in a $1bn, 27-storey Mumbai town house and
sends out invitations to his daughter’s wedding costing $4,000
each, about as much as four poor rural families spend in a year.
For all too many, the experience of Indian democracy has been
of promises made and broken. Mr Modi, as all but his bitterest crit-
ics admit, has made bigger, more effective efforts to expand the
reach of government help than any previous prime minister. But
he has also made bigger promises. The 230m Indians who voted for
him now expect him to honour them. They want better living stan-
dards, more access to clean water, decent education and health
services. They want honest government, impartial justice and a
strong India.
Will Mr Modi use his massive mandate to bring them a better
life? With India in a deepening, self-inflicted economic slump, the
answer hangs on which version of the prime minister they get: a
reformer determined to use his power to unleash India’s potential,
or a master manipulator with a much narrower vision of India’s
destiny. Unfortunately, judging from his record of six years in
power, people are right to be concerned that the prime minister is
less likely to raise India’s standard of living than to offer them in-
stead the “yellow flower” of feel-good Hindu majoritarianism.
This could do permanent damage to the country.
Mr Modi’s instinctive authoritarianism threatens many of the
freedoms that make his country so successful. One omen of
change is that, in a place as famously chatty as India, few people
were willing to be quoted by name in this special report. “They are
not just telling us to be positive in public any more,” whispers ahigh-tech tycoon at a fancy Mumbai dinner. “They are dictating
what they want us to say.”
Just now, the hold of Mr Modi’s party is not just impressively
strong but potentially suffocating. bjpleaders often say they aim
not simply to beat their rival but to make India “Congress-free”. If
the bjpwere just another secular party, that might not be so wor-
rying. But many parts of the state, from investigative agencies to
the once-vaunted Election Commission to national media and
even the Supreme Court, now seem to move according to Mr
Modi’s script. Despairing at patronage from their own parties, op-
position politicians have defected in droves. “If we opened our
doors completely, no one would remain outside,” jokes Amit Shah,
the home minister.
Though Mr Modi speaks proudly of Indian democracy, Mr Shah
has raised eyebrows by criticising the “weakness” of the multipar-
ty system. More controversial still is his insistence that, following
in the steps of Assam, a state that declared 2m of its residents to be
non-citizens and is building camps to intern them, the experi-
ment of creating a national register there should become nation-
wide. Minorities, especially Muslims, fear the focus of a massive
citizenship sweep would be on them. The government’s popular,
though constitutionally questionable, moves in Kashmir, and the
Supreme Court’s failure to challenge them, have not helped.
Indian democracy is being undermined in other ways. Back in
2014, Mr Modi’s most loudly proclaimed
promise was to tackle corruption. Fewer
top-level scams have emerged under his
rule, and several high-profile cases—typi-
cally involving political foes of the bjp—
have indeed gone to court. But low-level,
rent-seeking graft is still pervasive.
A “reform” of Mr Modi’s, the introduc-
tion of anonymous electoral bonds that
place no limit on how much donors can
lavish on political parties, simply legalises
influence-buying. An independent watch-
dog group suggests that some 95% of these bonds have gone to the
bjp. And if the proportion of elected officials with criminal re-
cords—currently 43% of mps—is anything to go by, the nexus be-
tween politics and money is as strong as ever.
India remains a fiercely pluralist country, with a noisy and pas-
sionate opposition. But the balance of power has now shifted mas-
sively to one end of the spectrum. This places extra responsibility
on Mr Modi. He can still choose whether to continue pursuing pol-
itics as a zero-sum game, where the winner takes all, or to recog-
nise that it is healthier for India to have a level playing field. The
vast majority of Indians want firm leadership and support Mr
Modi. But they would be happier if he attended to things that need
fixing rather than things that are not broken. And they would be
dismayed if he ends up breaking their democracy—one of the
things that makes all Indians rightfully proud. 7WhichModi?
The prime minister must reassure Indians that he is committed to
democracy and pluralismThe futureIndia’s new
wealth has
accumulated
disproportion-
ately at the
very top