Modi's economic vision, as I see it!

So, what’s Modi been up to in the last seven years? Naysayers have been criticizing him since 2002 and they will continue to do so forever and over the last seven years, in their pathological hatred for Modi, they have exposed themselves to be more anti-India than anti-Modi. This piece of writing, however, is not for these pathologically virulent haters of the man. This is for others, the silent majority of Indians who are willing to see reason and can debate without being partisan. Let us assess what have we seen in India over the last seven years – apparent things done by him and something nobody can dispute.

 

One, we haven’t seen any terrorist attacks that killed civilians outside of Jammu & Kashmir in seven years – yes, seven years! It was a regular feature during CONgress rule, wasn’t it? Two, Pakistan has been shown its place and given an answer to in the language it understands – we can see how precarious the state of Pakistan is, both economically as well as militarily. Three, our armed forces are getting the best of equipment (this is in contrast to the situation when our CONgress defense minister said that we didn’t have the money to buy fighter aircraft in 2013!) as well as mandate to use them as they deem fit – be it on the western borders or northern/ eastern – thus, we have busted the myth the CONgress and its cronies perpetrated for decades together that the larger neighbor was invincible! Four, we are building highways at nearly 40 kilometers a day and railways are just at the cusp of connecting all of India including J&K and northeast and not to mention electrification of the entire network will happen in a few years from now (today amongst largest railway networks in the world, India stands second with over 70% of the network electrified). Fifth, we have achieved 100% toilet coverage across India and hence also achieved open-defecation-free across the country. Six, we have made electricity available to all our six lac plus villages in the remotest parts of the country with almost zero power cuts. Seven, the health insurance scheme, Ayushman Bharat is providing health cover to 500 million of our economically challenged brothers and sisters. Eight, we are well on the way to achieve another major milestone of water on tap to every household across the country!  Nine, housing for everyone is another huge initiative of the government that’s helping the economically weak to have a roof over their head. Ten, the opening of Jan Dhan accounts to make banking accessible to over 430 million economically weak beneficiaries who have added their savings of US$20 billion into the formal banking system apart from the fact that the Jan Dhan accounts ensure that all government financial support reaches directly to the beneficiary eliminating all corruption! And lastly, in the last 18 months, we have emerged stronger from the devastating pandemic that the world is currently witnessing with a couple of indigenous vaccines that have been administered at break-neck speed to reach 700+ million doses! These are only the top ten things or so, that came to my mind as I looked back – am sure there are many many more! For all these things, the government needed money, big money – and for getting the money (which the CONgress government didn’t have in 2013 even to buy us fighter planes!), the economy had to perform for the government to generate the revenues to fund all these humungous tasks. So, this busts one of the big fat lies the CONgress keeps spreading that the Indian economy is failing – if the economy was indeed failing, then, where did the Modi government get the resources to deliver all of the above when in 2013 the CONgress didn’t have the money even to buy fighter aircraft?

 

However, the objective of this article is not to bust the lies CONgress has been spreading but to see what the Modi government’s economic vision appears to be. Is there any common thread that ties all these seemingly disparate activities that the Modi government is undertaking?

 

Let’s look.

The first thing Modi government embarked on was the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan – we know that the naysayers of Modi were ridiculing him when he embarked on this drive and by the way, the toilet-for-all mission was part of this project only. How was it significant? We know that India lives in her villages – we have known this for a long time now, and in villages (as well as in urban centers), a simple illness such as diarrhea can make an entire household (particularly economically backward ones) a financial wreck and make them trapped in debt forever! So, the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan would ensure that cleanliness was made an intrinsic part of all our lives and cleanliness will ensure that majority of diseases that emanate from lack of sanitation will be eliminated, and thus, most people will get de-risked from potential financial misery – isn't that simple yet brilliant? Modi government’s other programs have been similarly geared towards empowering the economically weaker segments across the length and breadth of the country – these include programs such as Gram Jyoti Yojana or rural electrification, Awas Yojana or housing for all, Jan Dhan Yojana or banking for all, Mudra Yojana or microloans for small entrepreneurs, Anna Yojana or food for the poorest of poor,  Ayushman Yojana or health insurance for covering all of the economically weak, Ujjwala Yojana or gas cylinders for rural women, and now the Jal Shakti Yojana to provide potable water on tap to all households, including all villages across the country. All these programs have only one theme and that is of empowering the rural as well as urban poor across the country. What would it deliver? One would say, a huge political dividend – that is for sure, but that apart, it is superb economics as well, as it has unleashed Bharat in ways that have perhaps not been done for nearly a millennia! I will explain this a little later but let me take up a few other things that Modi has done before I paint the overall picture of Modinomics as it will play out across Bharat in the coming decade and well beyond.

Apart from empowering the rural and urban poor across the country, what Modi has also done is also break the agriculture sector from shackles of inefficiency with the roll-out of three farm laws that as I have explained in one of my previous blogs – is a major gamechanger for the rural economy. Then, with his Atmanirbhar program, Modi is giving a huge push for indigenous manufacturing with amongst the lowest corporate taxation regime anywhere in the world attracting record FDIs into the country as well as incentivizing local players to step up their investments. Not just that, local manufacturing in the area of defense and opening the sector to private players have also spurred the sector into action with a significant jump in defense exports in the last seven years. Further, huge investment in the development of infrastructure across the country including roads, rail networks, ports, airports, and waterways is going to unleash the logistics sector in ways that we have never seen before leading to making Indian manufacturing competitive and further spurring domestic investment and FDI into the manufacturing sector. Further, with credit support to micro-enterprises, the Mudra Yojana has provided over 300 million microloans with an overall credit outlay of over $200 billion over the last seven years! Lastly, a program such as the One District One Product program will facilitate healthy competition within and across all the 700+ districts in the country to bring the best out of our people to showcase to the world.

 

Now that we have more or less captured most of what Modi has done over the last seven years – let's now see if there is a common thread that ties it all up and how does it unleash Bharat in ways that have not been done for nearly a millennia.

 

What is needed for a society to flourish and grow? Five things: stability, security, freedom, infrastructure, and opportunity. Modi has ensured all these for our people. As it is said, we can move as fast as our slowest constituent – hence, Modi's focus on the last man in the chain. Modi is empowering the poorest sections of our nation by giving them access to healthcare, electricity, potable water, food, and access to credit for setting up micro-enterprises, thus, unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit at the bottom of the pyramid – this will spur livelihood and eventual wealth creation for these currently marginalized segments of our nation. Imagine a scenario: with no lingering worries about healthcare, or for that matter food security or of roof over their heads and the fact they can now save two hours a day they spent just on getting potable water for the household and that they will have access to electricity giving them another four productive hours per day, the women in villages are getting empowered to start a micro-enterprise – now, assume that just a third of the women in Bharat (in the villages) potentially start such an enterprise, we are talking about nearly 100 million women who can potentially add say ₹6,000 per month to our GDP or over ₹7 lac crores p.a. or 3% of FY21’s GDP – assuming we can achieve this over 5 years period, this alone translates to a GDP bump up by 0.60 percentage points every year over the next 5 years just from women in rural India from a base of zero today! Now, imagine it’s not a third of such women but two-third of such women or for that matter all women participate in this revolution: GDP will see growth by 1.2% points to nearly 2% points just from this alone year-on-year for next five years! Further, with access to reliable electricity, a lot of agriculture-processing can take place within villages and apart from value-addition and value-creation in villages, food spoilage can be reduced or even eliminated – what would be the addition of this to the GDP? Also, with access to electricity and with the New Education Policy in place, the children pursuing studies in rural India i.e., over 300 million pupils will be spurred into pursuing academics and from that say just 0.1% achieve scholarship, we are looking at the very least over three hundred thousand high achievers coming from Bharat! All this will push rural India or Bharat’s resurgence as the new growth engine (right from the bottom of the pyramid) for India’s GDP, leading to not just be the source of GDP growth but also be the huge source for domestic consumption that would stimulate further demand creation in the economy that would be fed into by urban producers and service providers aka stimulation of economic activity across the country, from the bottom to the top.

 

Can you imagine the juggernaut that would be set rolling?

 

An empowered Bharat contributing by way of transformed agriculture and rural GDP will lead India’s economic growth from the bottom-up setting off a perpetual cycle of tremendous growth for decades to come. This is what Modi’s economic vision looks like to me!

God and man – where things went wrong?

Today’s conversation with a very dear friend made me write this up and ponder over this profound topic which has been reduced to a petty squabble in today’s context with the daily conflicts we see mankind engulfed in across the globe. This should make us wonder where things went wrong?

When we think of God, the first question that comes to mind is who made whom? Is it the humans who came up with the concept of God or was it God who created the humans? Now again, if we see, this question itself is reeking with the arrogance of humans – to even consider that God is a construct humans came up with is ridiculous. God has been there always – metaphysically speaking, God may be a word that humans came up with but He’s been there from time immemorial. Humans, as we exist today, have walked on this Earth for less than a few hundred thousand years but this Earth has been in this universe for 4.5 billion years – so, humans have just existed in about 0.007% of Earth’s history. Further, this universe has been in existence for 13.8 billion years and in its history, humans have contributed to just about 0.002%! Assuming, it is God that created this whole universe – which is exactly what all major religions of this world tell us – then, in God’s history, He’d have created and destroyed countless universes and in all those infinite numbers of universes, what’s the significance of humans and their history? The answer we all will agree with is an unequivocal “nothing!” Yet, here we are today squabbling over ownership of God and He must be very amused thinking that after all the primitive forms of life that He created such as the dinosaurs (who once ruled this Earth) et al, He created humans thinking that they were a creature with consciousness and the ability to think and reason – therefore, they would not squander away the chance to thrive and bring balance to life on Earth unlike all other species before it – yet, here we are, acting just like the dinosaurs did some 70 million years ago – perhaps it is time for Him to take a call and decide on the fate of humans just as He did to dinosaurs!

Before I go ahead and describe what God has kept in store for humans, let me first delve into how we reached where we are today. It is our arrogance that we think that we came up with the concept of God – the fact is, not so long back one famous astrophysicist, Carl Sagan said that there are surely many intelligent alien races that occupy this universe and thus was set up the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and after decades of this search, what they came up with that we are all but alone in this vast universe and that what we have on Earth is a very rare accident where too many happy coincidences occurred all together nearly 4 billion years ago and life appeared on Earth! Who brought about all these happy coincidences? Someone would say it was mother nature – well, that mother nature was existing across the whole vast universe but why all these happy coincidences did not happen anywhere else in the vast universe but only in its remote corner, on Earth? This perhaps was the first recorded act of God in the current version of the universe as we know it that is now nearly 14 billion years old! Were humans there when this act was done by God? No! So, this proves one thing that God is eternal and humans are just a blip in that eternity and that we take ourselves any more seriously only exposes our vanity, nothing else!

Jumping back to human history i.e. the last few hundred thousand years – we know that the earliest humans lived in caves mostly in hunter-gatherer communities. Along the way, we would have seen mother nature in all her raw glory – the heat of the sun, the wrath of the rains and the wind storms, the power of lightning bolts and the ferocity of fires – all of these would have instilled fear and awe in him and thus they became first symbols or representatives of his earliest God. So, we somehow came to believe that God is a concept made by man! Slowly, as his understanding of mother nature grew, man could control all these forces of nature to a certain degree and even overcome them, and thus his concept of God too grew complex. So, just as humans migrated from Africa some forty thousand years ago and went around the world, this concept too evolved just as how humans settled across different corners of Earth. This led to the eventual formation of religions as they exist across the world today.

The common denominator here is what we call religions that exist on Earth today aren’t representing God but the concept of God as we humans perceive Him.

The problem is further exacerbated by some religions who think that their “God” is the only God that is the true one and the God of all other religions are false and thus all humans who follow any other God should give in and follow their God or be eliminated. If you see, this whole premise is flawed as God that created the universe (long before the humans came to walk on Earth) is universal – He is the source of all that has been here and all that will be there!

So, how can a human concept of “God” ever replace this universal God who is the source of all creations of the past, present, and the future, including humans or excluding them? For all we know, just as dinosaurs went extinct, humans too may go extinct in the future, and along with them, all their concepts of God!

Further, if all religions believe in a universal God, then, why is there strife in the world today among humans over God? That’s the question for all of us to ponder about.

PM Modi’s Vision Of Converting A Pandemic Into An Opportunity

 With a big bang announcement about a fortnight or so back of Rs 20 lac crore comprehensive economic package, Prime Minister Modi has unveiled a vision of epic proportions which takes development of India to her roots, of what we know as Bharat, her villages. It is not the value of the package aka Rs 20 lac crores that is of any importance – in size, it is huge and does cover all the sections of the economy – however, what is of immense importance and is of epic proportions is the what it seeks to accomplish with the sector that employs the biggest chunk of Bharat’s workforce i.e. her farmers in the villages. Agriculture currently employs nearly 50% of Bharat’s over 50 crore workforce or as much as 25 crore people yet it contributes to only about 17% of her GDP of nearly $3 trillion or about $500 billion or so – in real terms, this means that a worker in sectors other than agriculture generates nearly 5 times more GDP than his/ her counterpart in the agriculture sector! No wonder, agriculture isn’t an attractive career for the youth and thus people moved from Bharat to India: from her villages to her cities and thus the cities are bursting at seams with fledgling slums and shantytowns.

So, what is this vision of Modi that has been unveiled? With the big bang package, PM Modi has broken the shackles agriculture has been tied down with for decades together – though, some claim that it has been so for hundreds of years! Whatever the truth, two major reforms in agriculture sector have been unleashed by PM Modi: one, the doing away of the binding on a farmer to adhere to Agriculture Produce Market Committees (APMC) act which stipulated him/ her to sell their produce mandatorily at the Mandis – s/he was not free to sell anywhere and to anyone; and two, major agriculture commodities are now excluded from the strictures of the Essential Commodities Act of 1955.

Now, how will these changes be gamechangers for the farmer?

Firstly, with APMC Act gone, the farmers will now be free to sell their produce anywhere and to anyone – this will open up the market for them. As of now, the farmer has to sell at the Mandi to the buyer via a Aadti (middle man) who took a commission from both the farmer and the buyer just because the Mandi system operates this way and instead of helping the farmer, it exploited them. This commission ranges from 8% to 20% and on top this, the price in Mandis is generally rigged by the Aadti cartels and thus the farmer is always shortchanged. With APMC gone, the farmer is freed from the Aadtis and the exploitative Mandis that their cartels ran! Further, the farmer can now also engage in contract farming for big institutional buyers (food processors, big retailers et al) wherein they can know the price of selling their produce upfront and thus doing away with the vagaries of price volatility too, ergo, the farmer can know the return on investment before they sowed the fields!

Secondly, the exclusion of major agriculture commodities from Essential Commodities Act means that private storage facilities can be built to store perishable agriculture produce and wastage can be reduced dramatically – currently, over Rs one lac crore worth of perishable agriculture produce is lost annually because of lack of proper storage facilities. With Essential Commodities Act out of the way, there will be a huge push towards building of storage facilities that will help sell farmer produce well into the lean season thereby further increasing their income. You may be wondering how the Essential Commodities Act stifled creation of storage facilities. Well, because of this Act, no private entity created large scale storage facilities for commodities that the Act covered as there was a storage ceiling these entities had to adhere to and hence, no economies of scales were ever achieved – now, this ceiling is gone! So, all the large retailers and food processors who deal in perishables will be free to create large storage facilities and store the produce to sell in lean seasons as well as to further process them as value-added produce.

Now, how will things play out from here?

This is where things get interesting – with Covid-19 pandemic and the ongoing lockdown, there has been a huge movement of migrant workers from industrial belts back to native states of UP, Bihar, MP, Rajasthan, Odisha & WB. It is estimated that a few crore of the migrant workers have gone back to their native states – do note that India has nearly 10% of her population as migrant workers which translates to nearly 12-13 crore workers. The return of this workforce back to the native states is going to create a lot of burden for these states. Unless the state government does something dramatic to create jobs en masse, this can create a lot of issues for these states. PM Modi’s Rs 20 lac crore package amongst other things has increased the allocation in MGNREGA by two-thirds, which essentially means that whilst earlier, the program was going to support nearly 2 crore workers - now, it will support additional 1.3 crore workers! This should help with temporarily resolving the need for jobs for part of the migrant workers who have gone back. Further, many states (Gujarat, MP, Haryana, HP, Rajasthan and Punjab)

have recently announced significant dilution of all the labor laws – this too should spur attracting industry to these states. With companies wanting to move out of China and considering India actively this should help – recently, a German footwear maker Von Wellx moved its factory lock, stock, and barrel from China to India (Agra, UP) where it will generate 10,000 jobs! Further, UP CM Yogi’s administration is conducting skill mapping of the migrant workers – this will help it to showcase the same to all potential investors – clearly, the workers coming back from industrial belts of Maharashtra & Gujrat would have significant skills and mapping them would lead to creating a compelling skill bank that can be used along with incentives like dilution of labor laws as well as others such as easy land allotments etc., to attract investors into the state in a big way.

That said, all this will take time – but if played well along with increased MGNREGA allocation as well as breaking the shackles for agriculture and attracting populace back to agriculture as a viable career option, it will be a gamechanger for these states. What these far reaching policy changes as well as pandemic’s side-effect of migrant workers’ return to home states can lead to is not just this! I am going to now paint a scenario that this vision can achieve for Bharat.

Three trends are likely to play out in parallel from here on.

One, and the most important as well as the pivotal trend is the revival of agriculture as a result of the policy changes supported by private investments as well as new interest from a brand-new breed of agriculture-entrepreneurs who will foray into this hitherto unattractive sector in a big way. Smaller and marginal farmers can get together and form Farmer Producer Organizations to scale up their production and investment abilities and share equipment, marketing reach as well as profits – they can also go for forward integration and get into value addition through food processing. Apart from increasing the income of existing farmers and spurring new ones to join the ranks, this will also encourage the migrant workers to stay back and encourage many of them to get back to agriculture with improving income prospects. With success of agriculture, we will see more and more people staying back in the villages and also encourage those who had left the villages for cities, to return back – this story should fully unfold in about a decade or even earlier but we will see credible offshoots within the next few years. To draw a parallel, do note that the milk revolution saw India double per capita milk production in 30 years (or nearly a four-fold increase in milk production between 1970 & 2000) – with technological advances along with information revolution, this kind of growth should be doable across the agriculture sector in a decade or even less. I say this because India’s per hectare yields in all crops from cereals to pulses is less than half or one-thirds the best that is there in the world. With the breaking of the policy shackles and focused push on agriculture with government and private involvement, there is no limit to what our farmers can achieve. This will have an immense impact on the rural economy leading to increase in per capita income like never before. As much as Bharat’s villages, this will have a huge impact on India’s cities that were bursting at their seams because of increased migrations from villages to cities leading to creation of slums and shantytowns – all this should reduce dramatically in the coming decade as people will prefer staying back in villages and some more of the migrant workers will return and engage in agriculture and allied services.

And, this is what will spur the second trend that will run in parallel: the increase in per-capita income in Bharat’s villages will lead to higher consumption driven by rural markets, which will spur industrial growth like never before. Till now, the industrial growth was driven primarily by urban and middle-class demand albeit there was secondary factor of rural demand driven by how agriculture fared in the said year. However, with the kind of growth we will see in agriculture in the coming decade and that too driven from grassroots involving nearly 70% of Bharat’s population, we will be witnessing demand generation at unprecedented scale. This will fuel India’s industrial and services growth at a different level pushing the overall GDP growth well into double digits pulling all of her populace out of poverty in the coming decade!

The third trend, a minor one albeit equally significant in its impact and one that will run in parallel to the other two and support them is the huge push towards renewable energy – India is already leading the International Solar Alliance and there is recent news of India taking lead in setting up the World Solar Bank, which will spur development of renewable energy projects in 84 countries that are already part of the ISA, mobilizing US$1 trillion. India has already achieved sub-Rs 3 per unit cost of electricity via renewable sources – with advances in technology this can and will further be improved upon. All this will help establish India as a leading force in renewable energy sector globally – a sector that will for the foreseeable future be a very important for all the nations. Then there is the accelerated adoption of electric vehicles in the coming decade because of improvement in technology as well as significant reduction in costs. All this will result in reduced dependence on fossil fuel by the end of this decade leading to reduced emissions and consequent environmental dividends. Availability of cheap and clean energy will help fuel industrial and agriculture growth throughout this decade without the fear of environmental impact. Reduced petroleum imports will also have a positive impact on Rupee which could see levels of 60 or even stronger vis-à-vis US Dollar too by the end of this decade – this essentially means that the Indian Rupee will have a higher buying power by the end of this decade.

These three trends having well played out by the middle of this decade we will see emergence of an atmanirbhar Bharat which, by then will be taking roots deep into India!

So, what's it about the new year?

In a few hours the current year will go into history and a new year will turn a new page with a new day!

The whole world is celebrating from the far east in the remote island of Kiritimati of Kiribati (where the new year day has already dawned as I write this) to the far western remote Baker Islands across the world - the spread of this new year moment is over almost 26 hours and 39 time-zones! So, if you wish to party into the new year like a real party animal you can hop into a new time zone and celebrate the new year 39 times over! Are you game?

You must be wondering why am I wanting to be party pooper? I am not!

I am just wondering why we celebrate this day and this moment only, why not every moment and every day? Why don't we celebrate every day like this day? I wish we learn to celebrate every day of our lives like we do on this day!

Wishing you all the joy that you get celebrating this "new year" on every day henceforth! :)

We don't need no education!

So, what's education? 

Well, many things come to mind thinking of this word..after the parents, first amongst those things is the school where the child spends most of her time during the most impressionable times of her life - a that too a good 15 years! And our education system tunes the child to compete at every step and that too in the same subjects with other children - whether or not the child likes the subject or not, they compete with one another for 15 long years! This streak of competition only increases as the years roll by in the school and then into the cut throat rat race of competitive exams for higher studies and then on to every stage of life - competition never ceases! 

But, what does competition do? 

The competition that we witness in our eduction system whilst promoting meritocracy, the damage it does over years to our children going through this system is that it takes away from them, their innocence, their sense of camaraderie, their empathy and replaces it with a zeal to get ahead at any cost, breeding self-promotion and self-centeredness that gets well entrenched in who they are and  becomes part of who they are much into their future lives.

Whilst, we don't want our children to be self-centered or selfish - instead we want them to be sensitive, having empathy - yet we, like a zombie, put them through an education system that coaches them overtly or covertly to be just the opposite! 

Can there be a greater irony than this? Shouldn't this stop?

Intolerance demystified

So, we have been told that we as a nation have become intolerant! And who has told us this?

A handful of self-styled half-intellectuals, pseudo-yellow-journalists, artists posing as intellectuals and of course corrupt politicians. Now-now, have I stirred a hornet’s nest here? I guess I may have but I hold on to this view because I have full reason to say what I said. Let me explain.

I will take one or two persons each from the above groups of people who were either involved in germinating the thought that we as a nation had suddenly become intolerant and then the people who kept it alive in public discourse and finally those who helped propagating it.

One of the first murmurs of we as a nation becoming intolerant came from a nondescript writer named Nayantara Sehgal who returned her Sahitya Akademi award, which was conferred in 1986 by the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress government. Who is Nayantara Sehgal? She is Motilal Nehru’s granddaughter, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit’s daughter and Rajiv Gandhi’s aunt. She returned the award that Rajiv-led government gave her in protest to rising intolerance in the country citing killings of Govind Pansare, Narendra Dabholkar & M.M. Kalburgi along with the Dadri lynching victim. Now, for a moment, let us set aside the fact that she’s a Congress loyalist and look at the reasons cited by her – the killings of one of the persons (Dabholkar) happened during Congress regime in Maharashtra (when UPA was in power in the center), the other (Kalburgi) happened in Karnataka (ruled by Congress) and third (Pansare) happened in Maharashtra within a few months of BJP-led government was formed in Maharashtra and last one (Dadri) happened in UP where a SP government is in place. So, why is Ms. Sahgal suddenly feeling the intolerance? Where was her intolerance in 1984 when there was Congress-led carnage of Sikhs when more than 5,000 innocent Sikhs were murdered – then, he had happily taken the award within two-years in 1986. She chose to remain silent then – was this the reason Rajiv bestowed Sahitya Akademi award to her? This clearly shows her hypocrisy. After her, many other writers followed suit – and if we were to look at them too, we would certainly see that most of them had Congress patronage (which is evident if 55 years of the 68 years of independent India was ruled by Congress and many of these people got their awards and patronage from Congress governments).

Lets now look at the pseudo-yellow-journalists – one of the big ones among them is Barkha Datt – who also wrote an open letter to the PM Modi recently – I wonder what makes us as a nation tolerate the likes of Datt – we know now with clinching evidence in form of recordings of what she was doing with Nira Raadia – Datt is not a journalist but a power broker who worked for corporate big-wigs to fix power deals in the UPA 1 & 2 regimes and is currently jobless and hence is back to trying her hand at journalism! Clearly, she’ll work for the interest of Congress and therefore try and sully the image of Modi-led BJP government using her part-time journalist job and organization i.e. NDTV, which helped keep the topic of intolerance alive in public discourse and sullied India’s image. There are many such pseudo-journalists and media-houses who did exactly like what Datt and NDTV did to help the cause of “intolerance” in this country.

Now, lets look at artists such Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan – both of these are plausibly good at their job i.e. acting albeit I think otherwise, yet I won’t take anything from them on that count. However, in acting they are directed by the director who helps mold them into the said character they have to depict. But are they intellectuals or do they qualify to comment on a topic such as intolerance? I don’t think so. Again a look at their background – it is very well known fact that Aamir is anti-Modi and the same can be traced back to his interview with another pseudo-yellow-journalist Shekhar Gupta, when he was trying to implicate Modi for 2002 riots in Gujarat. So, Aamir too has vested interests to support the intolerance plank and just as in movies he is directed by a director, here too he was perhaps being directed by a commendable director because of which Aamir also offered his wife’s to act for free along with her opinion to support the intolerance plank – the objective being that with millions of fans of Aamir and Shahrukh, the plank of intolerance shall spread far and wide and the government shall be kept busy tackling the non-issue and not be able to work for the people and for the nation.

And finally let us look at political parties who raked up the intolerance debate – most prominent among them being Congress who has been championing the cause of intolerance in the country – what has been their credentials: masters in corruption and looting of this country at an unprecedented scale for nearly six decades. It’s been a rarity to see them out of power and whenever they have had to sit away from the treasury benches, they have only raised non-issues to affect the performance of new government so that by hook or crook they can return to power and continue with their loot. Therefore, for establishing that there is “intolerance” in this country, they orchestrated the whole issue from germination by employing select so-called-intellectual loyalists such as Nayantara Sahgal, followed by brokers in media such as pseudo-journalist Barkha Datt who helped in establishing “intolerance” in public discourse and finally for propagating the same they used the actors in Bollywood with large fan-following such as Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan.

And, we as people of this country bought the story they touted and fell for it lock-stock-and-barrel.

What a pity!

So, what's going on?

It’s been nearly two years since the installation of new government led by Narendra Modi in New Delhi.

Do we remember the key plank on which Modi government came to power? Am sure we do not remember it anymore because it has dropped off the radar as it too has dropped dramatically. Corruption! I am sure, some of the skeptics among you would be pursing their lips and saying that, what crap, “how do I know?” Well, in such case you are saying that Modi government has been indulging in corruption using some extremely ingenious way that they have been doing it for two years and yet they have not been noticed yet. And, this when most of so-called “main-stream” media and opposition have been baying for blood of this new government from the way go, makes it even more commendable effort. Perhaps Congress should copy this new ingenious way adopted by Modi government so that if they ever come back to power, they can employ it to save themselves some future embarrassment, which they regularly albeit shamelessly faced during the previous 10-years of MMS-led UPA regime. As you would have figured out by now that there is a loads of pun intended in all this – one that there is such ingenious way and two more serious pun is that Congress will ever come back to power on the back of Pappu!

Now that it is very apparent that corruption has reduced drastically over the last two years and it’s been confirmed by independent sources too, lets explore as to whose loss it has been, this reduction in corruption. “What a ridiculous proposition!”, some of you are already thinking with a churning in your stomach.

Nevertheless, I will explore this question, as it is very pertinent. However, before I try and answer this question, some trends that became very prominent in the last two years. One unprecedented trend was gradual unification of all opposition parties against Modi-led NDA government – strangely, we did not see such a trend when Congress-led UPA was looting the country brazenly – however, we saw it in almost all assembly elections and it became sordid in Bihar when two bitter foes Nitish-Lalu joined forces with the Congress just to tackle Modi-juggernaut as their political existence was at stake. In all this, it has clearly been established there is no ideology of all these political parties except power and they would sell their mother just to remain in power. Clearly, the opposition was rattled after successive losses in Rajasthan, MP and Maharashtra and hence would do anything. Second trend was now that there is no corruption issue to corner the NDA government, hence, what issues they could they use to try and keep bombarding Modi-government to keep it busy in the same? So, they reverted to what they tried doing to Modi in Gujarat for 12-years and failed miserably. Hence, we saw issues such as Church attack in West Bengal, Dadri, Award-return, intolerance debate, JNU-strife et al. Whilst all of these events happened in states ruled by non-BJP parties, yet the punching bag was Modi-government! Did we see anything like this happen during 10-years of UPA rule when a mishap occurred in a state ruled by non-Congress government and yet the blame was brought to the door of Congress led UPA at the center? In fact, just the contrary happened, be it in Gujarat or Karnataka that were led by BJP-NDA governments – these state governments were on the receiving end always. One clear reason was that the Congress-led UPA at the center was facing huge corruption issues then and these attacks on non-Congress state governments would help them divert public opinion and also help them in weakening the state ruled by BJP as well! Talk of killing two birds with one stone!

Coming back to the question, so, who has lost out due to reduction in corruption apart from Congress? Well it is obvious, isn’t it? There are the likes of Barkha Dutt (who now has been “absolved” of sordid wheeling-dealing she did with Nira Raadia), Rajdeep Sardesai & Sagarika Ghose and co who benefited by murky dealings within UPA 1 & 2. Further, all of these people have lost the “perks” that included free rides along with the PM to wherever he visited (this was the norm during MMS regime and since Modi came to power, this “perk” has been discontinued) and more importantly the power that they wielded during UPA days have suddenly diminished drastically. Therefore, their biased diatribe against Modi was evident in their bogus criticism when he went on overseas tours as if MMS never went anywhere! Apart from these pseudo-journalists, the so-called intellectual elites (which include politicians, artists, journalists, writers, and such leeches) were also used to active government patronage, which include plush bunglows in Lutyens Delhi, awards (that were ostensibly returned to prove their loyalties to Congress and not the nation who had bestowed the same on them), elite club membership, and unbridled power to top it all. With advent of Modi-led NDA, all these people were suddenly starved of “perks” and “power” resulting in the backlash we are witnessing over the last two years. And since, corruption isn’t something they can rake up now as there isn’t anything to show, they are raking up non-issues such as what we have seen over two years aka ‘Modi’s foreign-tours’, ‘intolerance’, ‘freedom of speech’ – were these issues not there during UPA regime? Did no Dadri take place before? Wasn’t there intolerance earlier? And is ‘freedom of speech’ an issue that is applied selectively – Kamlesh Tiwari Vs Umer Khalid – we can see how each of these episodes have been treated so differently! And all these incidents happened in non-BJP-ruled states, yet blame was heaped on Modi-led NDA. Why?

The answer is not difficult to find. It is nothing to do with intolerance or freedom of speech – it has to do only with corruption, withdrawal of “perks” and lost power! The ‘you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-your-back’ machinery stands impaired and people who profited from it are feeling the pain and reacting. Hence, they are perpetually on a look out for issues to rake up and make mountains out of molehills. Hence, there is ‘intolerance’ or lack of ‘freedom-of-speech’, or rise of ‘hindutva’, et al in the country. These guys will keep going at it and newer issues will keep cropping up again and again till somehow they are able to go back to pre-Modi times by making sure that Modi-led NDA fails. A further look at what is happening with Jat agitation in Haryana or Gujjars in Rajasthan or Patels in Gujrat – all BJP-ruled states – do we have any such unrest elsewhere? Is it coincidence? Or is it by design? We need to identify and expose these designs of the so-called intellectuals who are deciding what India is and how it should be run. 

Note:

In this context, please do read this eye-opener piece by a real intellectual who has exposed the countless pseudo-intellectuals who have been used to suck-up-to-power-to-get-their-power in Delhi. http://www.mediacrooks.com/2016/02/intolerant-evictions.html#.VsrSn1JX-wZ. Interestingly, he in this article of December 2015, mentions JNU as one such power center in Delhi.