A CNN analyst named Stephen Collinson quotes what he calls President Trump’s ‘famous comment in a speech to veterans last year’. Evidently Trump had said, ‘What you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening.’
Prime Minister Narendra Modi would similarly want the Indian public to think that he and Amit Shah, the BJP president, never made their unsavoury bid to prevent a non-BJP government from governing one of India’s largest states, Maharashtra, of which Mumbai, India’s financial and commercial hub, is a part.
On November 23, a tweet from Modi publicized his delight at the sudden and almost secret installation, in that morning’s early hours, of a ministry led by the BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis. Within hours, however, parties opposed to the BJP demonstrated their majority on TV channels, and Fadnavis had to go.
In the rush to install Fadnavis, Modi used a rare constitutional provision allowing the Prime Minister, in a national emergency, to bypass his cabinet. Neither India as a whole nor Maharashtra faced an emergency on Nov 23. However, following a seemingly inconclusive election, Maharashtra was under president’s rule.
To preempt a deal reached by non-BJP parties, a BJP-led ministry had to be quickly installed. But for president’s rule to be withdrawn, the cabinet had to make a formal request. For that, however, there was no time.
A national emergency was therefore invoked, enabling Modi to circumvent the cabinet. The president duly signed away his rule, which in reality was the Modi cabinet’s rule. And Fadnavis took oath as chief minister.
Yet what Modi and Shah would like us to think is that what I have just summarized, which is what millions saw, heard and read, never happened.
After his ignominious gambit failed – after Uddhav Thackeray of the Shiv Sena, until recently the BJP’s ally, emerged to lead a coalition government in Maharashtra, with the Congress and the Nationalist Congress as allies -- Modi tweeted not only his good wishes to Thackeray; he expressed confidence that the new chief minister would do well.
The latest tweet is the only reality. What occurred in days previous never happened.
In due course, this crutch of popular amnesia will collapse, and well-entrenched leaders will fall on their faces.
They will also continue to make blunders, of which the latest is Modi’s over Maharashtra. The demonetization of 2016 (aimed above all at the funds of BJP’s opponents in UP) was the first, a stroke for which ordinary Indians, small farmers and small vendors continue to pay a price.
Meanwhile the brake that Maharashtra has supplied to Modi and Shah can be welcomed. The Shiv Sena, the Congress and the NCP are not natural allies, but all three have relied on what is likely to be a major roadblock for the uniformity sought by the BJP and the RSS: the love for its autonomy that every region in India cherishes.
The scholar Partha Chatterjee was among the first to suggest that this ‘federal’ impulse is likely to offer the strongest resistance to the project of uniformity which the Hindu Right is implementing in India.
This impulse in favour of regional autonomy, which in the recent past fetched political results in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Telangana, West Bengal, and Punjab, has now asserted itself in Maharashtra.
Another aspect of Maharashtra’s history and politics may be worth recalling: the tradition of peasant opposition to ‘Peshwai’, as the rule by priestly high-castes in the 18th and 19th centuries is known. A notable figure from this tradition was the reformer Keshav Sitaram Thackeray (1885-1973), the father of Shiv Sena’s founder, Bal Thackeray.
This tradition too is likely to weigh against antidemocratic drives.