Despite the demonetisation and the economic and agrarian crisis the current wave of patriotism has turned the tide in Modis favour
BJP supporters listen to PM Modi at the 'Sankalp' rally in Patna on March 3. Pic/AFP
Clearly, after the Pulwama attack on February 14 and the Indian Air Force raid on Balakot, Pakistan, 12 days later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's popularity has risen and it's expected to convert to enough votes and seats to return him in the next parliamentary election, for which an announcement could come this week.
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A Twitter friend recently said that rural Rajasthan - which just three months ago evicted the incumbent BJP state government - is charged up for Modi. Another friend in Mumbai says the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance is set to take two-thirds of the Maharashtra's 48 Lok Sabha seats. In UP, the situation is that the SP-BSP alliance may not help Mayawati now, for Akhilesh Yadav's core voters are likely to "vote Hindu" unlike her reliably transferable vote bloc. Only South India looks unimpressed.
Caveats remain. One, things can change overnight, though the chances are receding. Despite Modi's bravado that recent events were a "pilot project" in prelude to the real thing, you would think he's now in pole position, and so another airstrike or another form of "controlled war" (a favourite phrase of BJP strategists) would merely introduce an element of uncertainty.
Clearly, more than even casualties, the Indian government cannot stomach having one (or more) of its own as either prisoners of war (as was the case with Wing Commander Abhinandan) or hostages (as was the case in 1999's IC-814 hijacking). One could even argue that Modi's highest point was the period immediately following the Pulwama attack, when the entire nation felt under siege; the peak was the day of the airstrike. But if Modi finds public devotion waning then who knows? This is the same PM who surgically struck against his own public with the November 2016 demonetisation.
Two, the economy. During the recent outbreak of war fever, what escaped scrutiny was the recent release of statistics that, even during this era of cooked-up figures, were unflattering to the government. The economy had slowed down to 6.6 per cent, the worst in five quarters, dragging GDP growth to below seven per cent.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley may try all manner of verbal yoga and jalebi logic to emphasise that we're the fastest large-economy growth on the planet, but it is clearly not enough. Economists are all agreed that India needs at least 10 per cent GDP growth (and not of the cooked-up kind) to produce enough jobs for the labour market, which sees a million new entrants every month. The lack of jobs - the Centre of Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) in fact says demonetisation destroyed 18 million jobs - was what caused the BJP to lose three Hindi-speaking states in December, three states that may now get swept up in the current wave of patriotism that favours Modi.
But worse are the figures on agriculture: a 2.8 per cent growth in the October-December 2018 quarter, the worst in three years; and in nominal terms, this is just 2.04 per cent, the worst since 2004, when former NDA PM AB Vajpayee lost power. This means that agrarian distress has not abated - again, the other main factor that had been working against Modi before the Pulwama strike.
A conspiracy theorist might wonder about the timing of the Pulwama strike - it was as if the terrorist handlers were handing the election on a platter to the Modi government. By sheer coincidence, it happened the very day that recently-appointed Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra was to address her very first press conference. One keeps hearing about how savvy she is, but in the wake of the recent war clouds, she has vanished from the public mind.
No wonder, then, that Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray accused the Modi government of "manufacturing" such incidents as the Pulwama attack, and has publicly alleged that the Modi government has been planning on a pre-election "limited war" with Pakistan for the past two years. (He also called for an inquiry against National Security Advisor Ajit Doval for the intelligence failure that might otherwise have prevented the terrorist attack.) Less stridently, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has demanded that the Prime Minister present to her and other opposition leaders a briefing on the Pulwama attack, our air raid, and the Pakistani capture of our IAF pilot.
She has a point. No minister has ever told us what happened in the air raid; we've only read media reports that quote unnamed officials claiming that 300 terrorists were wiped out, though the foreign media that visited the site saw no evidence of this. She and others in the political class deserve to know, unless of course, Modi wants to exploit the whole episode for political advantage. Who can blame him; it means the difference between retaining power or losing it forever.
Aditya Sinha's latest book, India Unmade: How the Modi Government Broke the Economy, with Yashwant Sinha, is out now. He tweets @autumnshade Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
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