Dr. Prabhakar said PM Modi used ‘development’ as a Trojan horse to smuggle in Hindutva, while discussing his new book ‘The Crooked Timber of New India’. He is spouse to FM Nirmala Sitharaman.
The Modi regime is ‘staggeringly incompetent’ in its handling of the economy and most other things, though it is very competent in summoning baser, divisive feelings latent among the people, said economist and social commentator Dr. Parakala Prabhakar to Karan Thapar in an interview organised by The Wire on Friday.
Dr Prabhakar’s new book ‘The Crooked Timber of New India: Essays on A Republic in Crisis’ (published by Speaking Tiger) was formally launched on Sunday, May 14 in Bengaluru. The book comprises a series of essays on the Modi government’s handling of the economy, politics and other issues.
Dr. Prabhakar has a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, and incidentally, is married to Nirmala Sitharaman, the finance minister in the Modi cabinet.
Speaking about the context of his book, Dr. Prabhakar that Hindutva was smuggled in on the sly by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which won the 2014 election on the plank of ‘development’.
He also put forth the opinion that it would be a disaster for not only the economy but for the nation in general to have another Modi government in 2024.
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The popularity of Prime Minister Modi and the BJP, Dr. Prabhakar argued, is because of his ability to mobilise people and appeal to their baser instincts, inspired by Hindutva.
But this is not what Modi said in the run-up to the 2014 election, he noted. In speech after speech then, Dr. Prabhakar said, he had emphasised that the fight was not between Hindus and Muslims; but rather it was a fight of both Hindus and Muslims together against poverty and unemployment.
In 2014, Dr. Prabhakar recalled, Narendra Modi and the BJP had asked for votes after promising good governance, a clean and corruption-free government and ‘development’. The nation was not taken into confidence about their real intention to usher in a Hindu rashtra (Hindu nation) and unleash the forces of Hindutva, he said. Development thus was used like a Trojan horse to let Hindutva loose on an unsuspecting nation—and if this is what BJP and Modi stand for, they need to be resisted, he added.
In response to Karan Thapar’s comment that the nation appears to have accepted PM Modi’s version of Hindutva, which is why the largest segment of voters supported him in the elections, Dr. Prabhakar demurred.
According to him, BJP and Modi win because of the first-past-the-post system of election and, in any case, the 38 per cent votes that they polled constituted the ‘largest minority’.
The goal of leadership is to remove fissures and promote harmony, per Dr. Prabhakar; it is not the job of leaders to be divisive and pander to communal sentiments. If BJP and Modi wanted to usher in a Hindu rashtra, he said, that should have been the plank on which they should have contested the election in 2014.
Dr. Prabhakar pointed out that Hindu majoritarianism did not find acceptance in India when the ground was apparently most fertile for it— immediately after Partition. That was the time when millions of people from both communities were migrating en masse and bodies in thousands were arriving in each country; when feelings ran high, and fear and insecurity were more. But majoritarianism did not find acceptance in India at that time.
Yet it is finding acceptance seven decades later, among a generation of Indians who possibly have no recollection of the Partition and presumably did not suffer from it, highlighted Dr. Prabhakar.
India is being dragged back to the Dark Ages and the slide needs to be arrested, he added.
Source: NH
