PM has realised that to govern India you need inclusiveness: Meghnad Desai

The Indian-origin U.K. leader says Modi has reinvented the centre, building a BJP where Hindu nationalism is not the only thing

August 07, 2017 10:34 pm | Updated 10:34 pm IST

Lord Meghnad Desai

Lord Meghnad Desai

Lord Meghnad Desai, economist and Labour politician,speaks to The Hindu on his new book, Politicshock: Trump, Modi, Brexit and the Prospect for Liberal Democracy .

Your book is a broad sweep on the construction and denouement of the Liberal Order (LO). Do you see it recovering from the events from 2008 onwards?

There is no doubt that recovery has been very slow and because of that there have been endogenous forces that are delaying globalisation. If it was true that the old model was dependent upon globalisation, free trade, a certain amount of free movement of goods, capital and labour, there is a questioning as free movement of labour is being objected to in the US and UK. I haven’t gone into all of that, but there is a question to ask here, whether this is a cyclical ebbing of the liberal order, and then it is restored, because technology is changing so profoundly that we may have to construct completely different kind of society. If the fourth industrial revolution comes, which we barely understand, there will not be very many jobs left for manual workers or even skilled workers to do. Like driverless cars, artificial intelligence may even take away white collar jobs. The question is, how are we going to configure society in which people have to be paid to be able to live, and work that is rough and ready, productivity could be measured and so on. If that big thing is removed and society doesn’t move on the vision of human labour, then we will have to think of all sorts of problems, which we haven’t even begun to think about. Right now we are trying to restore a status quo ante rather than looking at the challenges we face. In both the technology part and on the democratic order part we face challenges.

The liberal order, you said, terms populism as suspicious, and nationalism is not a high virtue, but there is a debate on this raging in both the United States and in India.

The Europeans think they live in some post nationalist paradise, but Donald Trump’s arrival signals that the Americans don’t think like that. There the category of nation matters. You step away from the North Atlantic and you find that nationalism has not died, nationalism is a potent force. In that sense, the European view of nationalism is actually parochial, despite the fact that it is one the richest parts of the world. Both economic and political nationalism are substantial ideological programmes which have to be accommodated in any reconstruction of the liberal order. The liberal order will have to go beyond the theoretical underpinnings of the North Atlantic, will have to include the rest of us. In nationalism, there are many good things and bad things, but for most countries it is an important construct. You may debate the nature of nationalism but it is a nationalist narrative. Europeans have forgotten that they arrived at this free trade globalisation paradigm via trade protectionism and tariffs, and there appears to be an amnesia of history, on imperial doings, in reaching this space. For example, the Jihadist movement is an echo of what happened to the Ottoman empire, and now that that diaspora settles in the West, there is a consciousness of that, even if the West has forgotten it, there is a sense of wanting to settle scores. These things have to be understood for a genuinely universalist liberal order.

In your book, you suggest that both (U.S. President) Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, by moving politics from the Centre, where the liberal order had located it, become disruptors. What is the way for Congress in India, in that scheme?

The one difference between President Trump and Prime Minister Modi, is that the former was a minoritarian candidate, a populist, who takes one section of the population as the “true” representative of the nation and the rest being characterised as effetes. Prime Minister Modi went the other way. He realised that the BJP was playing in the Centre ground under (former Prime Minister) Vajpayee and minimising its differences with the Congress. So in 1996, 1998, 1999, the maximum the party got in Parliament was 180 or so seats. My hunch is that sitting in Ahmedabad, Narendra Modi was the first BJP man to figure that it wasn’t working. He realised that you do not hide your personality but you adapt it by going inclusive. So “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas” came up and while some may dismiss it by not believing him, the people at large do. You suddenly have a man who is recreating a narrative with an opposition that is in denial. Trump may have gone off Centre, but Modi has reinvented it. He is building a BJP where the core Hindu nationalism hasn’t gone away but that is not the only thing. To govern India you need inclusiveness, not just on religious grounds but on developmental grounds. A prime example is what he said about celebrating the Quit India movement, where he said corruption and communalism should quit India, unlike Nitish Kumar who hewed to the binary presented by the opposition of taking a stand against corruption but giving in to communalism (joining BJP). Prime Minister Modi rejected that binary.

What is the prescription for the Congress in this scenario?

Congress has wasted three years in self denial, they have neither analysed their failures nor have they constructed an alternative narrative. They haven’t even understood Modi’s narrative. They go on playing the secular-communal game and do not take his inclusiveness seriously. That way, I would advise the Congress to construct a narrative based on Citizenship, not on the binaries of secular-communal. Religion is a private matter, and a person’s rights should be guaranteed as citizens of the country not because they are Hindus or Muslims. For example Tasleema Nasreen’s is an interesting case where in West Bengal, even the communists were not backing her because of fear of losing Muslim votes. What happened to Salman Rushdie, you cannot have something like that in a genuinely secular country, and if secularism is just a vote-getting trick, then that is failing too. What do you put in its place if this is not working, my prescription is, you go back to the notion of Rights, a notion of Citizenship, a consequence of that of course could be a rethink on caste-based reservations and more in terms of affirmative action for the economically backward. A notion that Mohan Bhagwat got shut down for just before the Bihar elections.

China has broken the mould of Communist economy stagnation leading to full democratic rights. How do you look at it and what will happen next?

Even the Asian democratic order is not as liberal as the West. Like the Japanese model is a one-party dominant democracy, South Korea alternates on dictatorship and democracy, Singapore a single party scheme. The point is that there are models of democracy where people are happy but which does not deliver the full liberal order menu. China is the only successful Communist Party in history, the experiment that it has done has been successful because it is a party which is able to adapt and transform itself internally in its economic philosophy. My own private view is that Deng Xiaoping looked at Taiwan, which, according to the Chinese Communist Party mythology should have been a slum, should have destroyed itself, instead it was a success. Deng had this amazing ability to abandon his cherished beliefs and reinvent himself, the Congress party could learn a lot from him. Forget your accepted assumptions and look outside the windows and see that the world may be different from what you think. Therefore China has broken the barrier of communism not delivering prosperity, they have combined communism and capitalism very successfully. I’ll cite this little debate with Will Hutton, where he argued that if you give people bread and butter, they will demand democratic rights next, where I said, hang on, nothing in social science is that definitive. Whenever China’s Narendra Modi comes, who knows Xi Jinping may be that, he will adapt China’s culture with a Chinese model of democracy. It may not look like any democracy we know yet, but it will give much greater freedom than is there now. Right now they are on an imperial venture, to be number one in the world again, that is their problem, but they might, after a while have a mix of democratic freedoms, income growth and a little bit of this and that, a truly Chinese model of the liberal Order. China will come up with its own model of democracy when they do.

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