A sense of history can easily be the casualty in times when tweets running out of characters make way for newspaper op-eds, and books emerge from op-eds running out of space. Any exercise in sizing up our times and its key figures has to tame a few disadvantages if it has the ambition of being taken seriously as contemporary history.
Being witness to, or part of, unfolding times rules out the benefit of hindsight—an advantage earned by historical distance. Second, being involved with the immediacy of themes further constricts the scope of cold reasoning and fair scrutiny.
These are two key challenges which confront Shashi Tharoor’s The Paradoxical Prime Minister (Aleph Book Company, 2018). Its chances of securing a longer shelf life will be determined largely by its success or failure in overcoming them.
In offering an account of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his nearly four-and-a-half years in office, Tharoor forays into a zone where it would be difficult for him to be seen as an impartial observer. But, in his introduction to the book, Tharoor berates the binaries of black-and-white in our political discourse and pitches the book as an effort made by “a fair-minded Opposition MP looking back at the Modi years”.
Irrespective of the merits of that claim, what really needs to be made a yardstick for evaluating the book’s historical worth is envisaging its value—or even lack of it—for someone trying to make holistic sense of the present sometime in future, say, four decades later. This is a vital test for assessing the narrative worth of the chronicles of our times.
As Prime Minister Modi’s failures, and there are many, become more glaring for his critics, and disappointments and a sense of missed opportunity sets in among his supporters, the book has crucial years of the second decade of the current century as its material. However, with a blend of dilettantism and a lack of historical perspective, if not imagination, Tharoor wastes the opportunity. In the five sections of the book, further divided into 50 chapters, Tharoor fails in elevating his critique of Modi’s tenure in the South Block to a seminality of historical insights.
Before coming to Tharoor’s work, something needs to recalled. Despite different factors responsible for it, just as they are in any Indian electoral result, there was a tendency among historians to see Modi’s 2014 win as a definite announcement of conservative politics arriving on the Indian political stage. For instance, exactly a month after Narendra Modi became prime minister, Cambridge historian professor Shruti Kapila wrote: “Modi’s victory has declared the arrival of a distinctive brand of conservatism as the mandated political language to direct India’s future … In India today, conservatism has acquired a kind of revolutionary import, in that it is the byword of change. Overwhelmingly, the Modi mandate is certainly not about protecting old privilege. Quite the opposite. It is all about validating the new.’’
Four-and-a-half years later, Tharoor derives the name of the book from his central premise that there is “fundamental contradiction within Modi as Prime Minister—he advocates liberal principles and objectives, but if these are to be fulfilled he would need to jettison the very illiberal forces that have helped ensure his electoral victories … That will prove to be his undoing, and if allowed to prevail, will destroy everything that is good, noble and decent about the country.”
Tharoor is stating the obvious in saying that the prime minister echoes the liberal views on public platforms, while the ideological mandate of his electoral appeal and triumphs is largely conservative. But what shouldn’t surprise Tharoor is that the conciliation of contradictions and mediation of seemingly irreconcilable claims are one of the functions of modern democracies. Leaders embodying such contradictions and mediation of interests are products of the same process.
The demands of constitutional morality, imbued with liberal values, are on maintaining the sanctity of this democratic transaction. It neither precludes nor predates articulation of individual and group interests.
Second, in a cosmopolitan echo chamber far removed from the realities of average Indian living, Tharoor pits India against the dangers posed by a large number of Indians with a conservative belief system who have their traditional ideas of common decencies. Such constriction of the idea of “good, noble and decent” is as illiberal an idea as the assault of illiberalism that Tharoor fears.
Third, what Tharoor fails in identifying is that far from being an unnatural aberration, different forms of identity politics are intrinsic to India’s political life. Modi’s victory, or, for that matter, his possible defeat (or what Tharoor calls his “undoing”), isn’t relevant for the stream of cultural conservatism which has always been there and will stay—sometimes asserting itself more, sometimes less. It’s the political conservatism which came of age in 2014 under Modi and will have its own cycle of wins and defeats. In the process, it may embrace as well as distance cultural projects, blending conviction with convenience.
Tharoor follows his premise with a section titled “The Modi-fication of India’’ containing 15 chapters. He raises valid concerns regarding dubious plans and sporadic attempts at historical distortion, rewriting and planting of questionable facts by elements within the Indian Right who treat history as a political project. What, however, negates his concern is his unquestioning acceptance of ideologically convenient accounts of India’s past offered by predominantly Left-leaning historians in school and university texts.
It’s amusing that Tharoor prioritises ideological projects over unalloyed curiosity for exploring the past. For instance, in failing to register or using euphemisms for numerous acts of cultural vandalism perpetrated in medieval India, Tharoor ends up siding with not only convenient versions of history but sometimes even with grossly dishonest academic exercises. It was evident in the unnecessary space Tharoor gives to discuss deeply flawed reasoning of someone like Audrey Truschke. One expected Tharoor to be aware of her recent acts of subverting even basic norms of academic argument, including misquoting a source she had cited in her defence.
Whether coming from the Right or the Left, the cure to ideological infiltration in history lies in studying and discovering the past for sheer curiosity. While objectivity isn’t a companion that history can boast of, as Edward Hallett Carr famously argued in his seminal work What Is History? (Cambridge University Press, 1961), it can certainly avoid being fake.
Like Tharoor’s last book Why I Am a Hindu (Aleph Book Company, 2018) talked about Sanskrit texts without going through the rigours of grasping the Sanskrit language, The Paradoxical Prime Minister lacks a stamp of personal investment in research. In all the sections, he wades through assorted material to make a point or two. Most points seem current affairs revisited, though they provide a recap of issues on which the Modi regime can be held accountable.
While chapters on communal violence, mob lynching and cow vigilantism are expectedly there, they don’t go beyond media narratives to develop a nuanced understanding of the subject. For instance, the chapter on cow vigilantism politics could have tried to also look at the other side of the working and challenges of genuine and law-abiding cow protection groups, and how they are striving to shield a way of life and cattle-based rural economies.
This could have also led Tharoor to discover the fact that the history of cow protection in modern India goes far back, and includes figures he has shown admiration for in the book—Mahatma Gandhi and Dayanand Saraswati. Gandhi, as Tharoor rightly points out, opposed the imposition of a ban on cow slaughter despite his belief in cow protection. What, however, should also be remembered is that Gandhi, unlike Hindu Mahasabha’s VD Savarkar, in his writings in Young India had regarded cow protection as an essential part of Hinduism and the duty of all Hindus. Dayanand Saraswati, whom Tharoor credits with teaching “inclusive and self-interrogating Hinduism”, founded the first Gaurakshini Sabha of modern India in 1882.
Removed from their social contexts, some chapters end up as poor guides to understanding certain policy responses. In such cases, Tharoor abandons holistic analysis for the confined templates of English media narratives. For instance, while talking about anti-Romeo squads in Uttar Pradesh, he heavily relies on how the English media approached the issue and in the process shows a complete disconnect with how a large section of people in the state viewed the issue. A look at people’s responses and how the local media reported on it would have provided a more useful insight. It might have made him aware that the poll promise of dedicated squads and the strict crackdown on stalking and eve-teasing received popular support in many parts of the state.
The chapter on the Modi government’s alleged attempts to push Hindi meanders and does so with bits of media reporting. It lacks the context of Hindi’s evolution in national consciousness while trying to push in an alarmist subtext of insidious Hindi nationalism. In fact, it was more envisaged in the form of the link language, something Gandhi supported as an idea in his writings as well in his chairmanship of two sessions of Hindi Sahitya Sabhas. Whatever be the history, unlike Jana Sangh, its successor, the Bharatiya Janata Party, even under Shah-Modi, hasn’t gone beyond sporadic tokenism on Hindi.
In examining the Modi government’s approach to Sangh-mandated cultural projects, Tharoor could have reflected on the tussle between political costs and limited state capacity on one side and the Sangh’s anxieties about the marginalisation of cultural agenda on the other. This would have been interesting, given the fact that Tharoor repeatedly talks about the autonomy that Modi has carved out for himself in the conduct of the party and the government.
Tharoor’s section on Modi’s poor performance in governance has short chapters on themes ranging from institutions to Parliament, and from matters of justice and cutting red-tape to the dismal state of its flagship Swachh Bharat. A longer chapter on civil services reforms, or the lack of it, would have been welcome. One says so because that’s one of the starkest failures of the current regime and one which witnessed various false starts to recoil back to the status quo.
However, when talking about Modi’s drive for creating a bureaucratic ecosystem, Tharoor discounts the anxieties in the political class in dealing with what they consider entrenched power interests. That may sometimes be real and sometimes imagined too. The second aspect could be of ideological and loyalty alignments. In this context, Tharoor could have talked about the ideological construct of “committed bureaucracy” developed in the 1970s under the Indira Gandhi regime. It impinged on the principles of neutrality in civil services while seeking ideological alignment with the government’s policy framework.
On matters of economy, Tharoor chooses issues like the dismal rate of job creation and dramatic measures like demonetisation to expose the Modi government’s key failures. He relies on data and analysis offered by different experts as well as official documents. There isn’t anything new here which one may not come across in the usual news and analysis cycle. To an extent, the chapters in this section suffer from a dilettante’s handling and end up stating the obvious.
The Modi government’s failures in the conduct of international relations, particularly after the glow of initial promise in its engagement with big powers and its neighbours, is covered in the last section. Modi’s initial investment of personal energy in foreign affairs impresses Tharoor who then analyses its subsequent setbacks and loss of direction. He argues that attempts to chart its own course, say elements of change, in foreign policy have largely led to setbacks, while elements of continuity with India’s traditional foreign policy positions have brought rewards for the current foreign policy establishment too.
One theoretical question which Tharoor, with a career in UN diplomacy, could have examined for readers is: has Modi’s foreign policy regime faltered in balancing the quest for strategic autonomy and the demands of complex interdependence? As Tharoor has often dwelt on it, one expected him to reflect on the little effort being made by the government in expanding the severely understaffed foreign service, a mismatch given country’s size and aspirations of emerging as a global power.
What all these sections lack is a thematic cohesiveness. There are times when the lack of an editorial anchor make different chapters read like islands adrift. Some chapters fail to rise above rambling jottings or a series of sound bites to television channels.
The Paradoxical Prime Minister takes too many polemical detours to serve as an authentic account of the country’s most powerful man and his politics in the last four-and-a-half years. To an extent, it’s a casualty of the lack of historical distance, demands of ideological counter and know-all dilettantism. To its credit, it still manages to ask some relevant questions and make some of the right noises.
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