The Hindi press on the decline of regional politics
How did the Hindi press evaluate Modi's grand vikaswaad rhetoric? Their analysis was often marred by clichés and lack of nuance,
says ABHISHEK CHOUDHARY
With the BJP’s stupendous performance in the assembly elections of Haryana and Maharashtra, 2014 will go down in public memory as the year when the BJP became the new Congress in its geographical spread. Since the Hindi heartland has been central to BJP’s ever-rising fortunes, it’s a good time to take stock of what the Hindi press had to say about the assembly election results in two of India’s economically developed states.
“Na prantwaad, na jaatiwaad, na bhashawaad,” prime minister Modi repeated all through his 36 rallies in Haryana and Maharashtra, “sirf vikaswaad, aur vikaswaad!” No regionalism, no casteism, no languagism; only development, and some more of it! Let’s therefore begin with how the Hindi press evaluated the grand vikaswaad rhetoric.
An edit in Dainik Jagran on October 20 read: “Whichever party [out of Shiv Sena and NCP] becomes BJP’s partner in Maharashtra, the chief minister would be from the BJP. This would help the Modi government run the country’s financial capital more efficiently, the gains from which couldalso trickle down to states other than Maharashtra.”
Hindustan’s edit on October 21, Vikas Ke Kshetra (Regions of Development), was on similar lines: “During the UPA government, a lot of important schemes got stuck up because of a lack of cooperation from the states,” implying that the BJP ruling more number of states would be beneficial for all those states: “investors would be more comfortable to invest in those states,” “work on the Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor could be speeded up,” and so on. So far it made sense. Then the piece lapsed into banality: “If the central and western states develop faster, it would put pressure on others—especially eastern states of West Bengal, Bihar and Odisha, where private investments are low—to perform better. It’s possible that this would create a healthy competition between the BJP- and the non-BJP-ruled states.”
Inter-state relations, especially when it comes to economic gains, have been historically subject to serious conflicts of interest and need more careful, nuanced explanations. The Navbharat Times edit of October 21 also made the same mistake: “In the era of [economic] liberalisation, things like regional pride don’t hold much ground.” This might be true, except that the story is a little more complex: so far only a handful of Indian states are equipped to benefit from the economic liberalisation.
In fact, on October 20, former Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar staged yet another dharna in Patna demanding a special category status (SCS). Last year both Bihar and Odisha held rallies in Delhi for the same demand. (West Bengal has also, though a little less vociferously, demand a SCS.) Their demand is based on the premise that the mineral-rich eastern states had—through policies like Freight Equalisation—subsidised the industrialisation in western and southern India in the early decades after independence, and therefore they need the SCS as a payback. The merits and demerits of a demand like this have been examined by economic experts, but it can’t be denied that the inter-state disparities in India have risen over the last few decades. The short point is: complex political economy debates shouldn’t be over-simplified.
Dainik Bhaskar had a rather sober edit on the declining fortunes of the regional parties: “This is an alarm bell for regional parties like Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samajwadi Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal and Janata Dal (United). They need to think hard about their future, lest they be reduced to the fate meted out to Omprakash Chautala in Haryana.” It went on to explain that after V. P. Singh became the prime minister in 1989, the regional parties had been on a rise and, till as late as 2013, the possibility of this trend being reversed seemed impossible.
Assembly elections are soon going to be held in three states—Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir and Jharkhand—and media has already started talking about BJP sweeping the elections in Jharkhand and Delhi. Amar Ujala had an amusing opinion piece by Jagdish Upasane on October 22: “The Modi-Shah combo’s aim of a Congress-free country wouldn’t bear fruit unless it gets rid of the regional parties, which succeed by doling out fake sub-nationalism. It’s these regional parties that have made Congress rule in the centre possible for such a long time.” It sounded as if he was making a case for a single-party rule in the country.
It was only an opinion piece by Pushpranjan in Jansatta, a newspaper known for its leftist leanings,that deemed it important to talk about the centralisation of power in the hands of Modi-Shah duo, and the danger that this holds for the BJP’s internal democracy, and the country as a whole. “Any political science student would know that the MLAs are entitled to choose their chief minister. But the central parliamentary board of BJP, by handpicking its chief ministers [for Haryana and Maharashtra], is doing exactly what once the Congress high command did.”It went on to add that immediately after the parliamentary board meeting of BJP leaders on Sunday, October 19—including senior BJP leaders like Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitely and Sushma Swaraj—Modi and Shah sat together for a separate meeting.
The success of the BJP government, Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s column in The Indian Express argued, depends a lot on how it jiggles between the centralised decision-making of the Modi-Shah duo and the administrative decentralisation that the states would require in order to function efficiently as well as implement Modi’s grand development agenda.
The Jansatta opinion piece was also one of the only two to talk about Congress, which has been more or less decimated in both the states: “The introspection in Congress comes to a halt when it concerns Gandhi family.” While the party had constituted a panel led by A. K. Antony to analyse its failure in the Lok Sabha elections, the report apparently had nothing to say aboutthe top brass. “The sycophants have been proposing Priyanka’s name, in whom they see the charisma of her grandma Indira. Then, with time, Robert Vadra might want one of his children’s names as the Congress successor.”
In Parivar Hatao-Party Bachao (Get Rid of Dynasty-Save Congress, October 22), Rajeev Sachan, an associate editor with Jagran, argued about Rahul Gandhi’s immaturity as the leader of the grand old party. It also argued that Priyanka’s ascension to the top is a double-edged sword: “The problem with her is: along with being a Gandhi, she is also a Vadra; and (given Robert Vadra’s alleged involvement in the land deal with DLF) the lesser we talk about Vadra, the better it is.” For a piece arguing for a Congress minus the Gandhi family monopoly, though, it ended on a confusing note, saying “things would have been different if Sonia was full-fledgedly active and took more decisions on her own, rather than Rahul”.
The most important question for now is: what can Congress do to make a comeback as a credible opposition—if nothing more than that? None of the edits or columns in Hindi had much to say on this.
(Abhishek Choudhary is with The Hoot. Twitter: @cyabhishek.)
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