AS expected, the Narendra Modi-led BJP/NDA central government launched a propaganda blitzkrieg in both print and electronic media on the completion of its one year in office on May 26, 2015. Modi himself addressed a rally in Mathura. It was announced that BJP central ministers would address 200 rallies and 200 press conferences all over the country to propagate the ‘achievements’ of the Modi regime. But unlike the pure hype generated in the election campaign a year ago, the propaganda this time had lost much of its sheen. The summer of discontent was evident from the sharp reactions of many sections of the working people and also from the guarded criticism in several major newspaper editorials. The short span of one year was enough to show that the ‘Achche Din’ promised by Modi were meant only for the domestic and foreign corporates and the Sangh Parivar; but for the vast mass of the working people they were nothing but ‘Bure Din’ with a vengeance. SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME For those with a class outlook on Indian politics, this was hardly surprising. The nature of the last general election campaign itself was enough to show the shape of things to come. The BJP came to power in May 2014 with a clear majority of 282 seats in the Lok Sabha, but with only 31 per cent of the votes. The BJP victory was a result of three major factors. The first was the bankruptcy of the Congress-led UPA regime, as manifested in massive corruption scams and its neoliberal policies that intensified price rise, unemployment and the agrarian crisis. This was further compounded by the weak and ineffective leadership of Manmohan Singh as prime minister. With the withdrawal of outside support by the Left, the few pro-people steps that the UPA regime was forced to take earlier also disappeared. The widespread public impression was that the Congress was doomed in these elections. The second was the role of the RSS-directed Sangh Parivar, which anointed Modi as the prime ministerial candidate of the fractious BJP, despite strong opposition from L K Advani and many others. The Sangh Parivar also incited communal polarisation in the country that helped the BJP to make spectacular gains in populous states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Under the direction of Modi’s hatchet man Amit Shah, as many as 27 major incidents of communal violence took place in UP in two years, culminating in the Muzaffarnagar riots. With this, the BJP tally of Lok Sabha seats in UP shot up from 10 to 73 out of 80. The Sangh Parivar pulled out all stops and supported Modi and the BJP to the hilt. It was the first time that an RSS pracharak became prime minister. Naturally, despite all the tall talk of ‘development’, the RSS agenda of establishing its Hindu Rashtra came to the fore. The third crucial factor was the decisive shift of the corporate lobby towards Modi in the run-up to the general election. Large sections of the corporate lobby had stood behind the Congress in the previous two polls. With the Congress being seen as a sinking ship, they switched to an alternative which they saw as even more conducive to them. The corporate support to Modi and the BJP was manifested in the unprecedented coverage given to them in both print and electronic media, most of which are owned by the corporates themselves, and in the unlimited money power that was placed at the disposal of Modi in these elections. It was obvious that when Modi came to power, ‘pay-back time’ would begin. THREE DANGEROUS FEATURES In the last one year three dangerous features of the Modi regime have become crystal clear. The first feature is that this is unquestionably the most unashamedly pro-rich and anti-poor central government that India has ever had. This does not mean that any of the earlier central governments were pro-poor and anti-rich. All of them also represented the same big bourgeois-landlord exploiting classes. But compared to earlier Congress-led and even BJP-led regimes, the Modi dispensation is rushing ahead with policies that are even more nakedly and aggressively pro-corporate and anti-people. Crony capitalism is being openly promoted and even flaunted. Encouraging FDI in key sectors, the disinvestment drive in the public sector, the throwaway of national resources to private players at a pittance, the massive tax concessions given to corporates in the budget and the dismantling of the Planning Commission are glaring indications of the Modi regime’s pay-backs to the rich. The Modi regime’s main targets are the organised and unorganised working class, the peasantry and agricultural workers, and also the socially oppressed sections – minorities, dalits, tribals and women. The retrograde land acquisition ordinance, the move to make reactionary changes in labour laws, the steps to reverse the MNREGA, the National Food Security Act (FSA) and the Forest Rights Act (FRA), and the savage cuts in all social welfare schemes are some prime examples of the Modi regime’s attacks on the people, many of which again constitute a great bonanza for the corporates and the landlords. The second feature is that never before in the history of independent India have we had a prime minister, who as chief minister presided over communal riots engineered by his own party and organisation – that too, the worst communal riots in the country since partition. This shameful aspect has been ignored even by political commentators who have been otherwise critical of the Modi regime. With a clear majority in the Lok Sabha behind it (thankfully not in the Rajya Sabha), the Modi regime has embarked on a multi-pronged communal thrust in all spheres. Education, culture and history are some major target areas. This communal offensive is accompanied by casteist mobilisation as per local conditions. The third feature is the marked tilt of the Modi regime towards authoritarianism and an extreme form of individualism. The individualism is such that it has been said that this is certainly not an NDA government; nor even a BJP government; it is simply a Modi government. This is no doubt an oversimplification, but there is a grain of truth in it. The PMO has been made supreme, overriding all other ministries and departments. There is a concerted attempt to trample over institutions. Modi’s opponents in his own party have been sidelined. As seen in the Ordinance Raj and the systematic undermining of parliamentary procedures, the Modi regime is attacking parliamentary democracy as well. REPLICATING THE GUJARAT MODEL Any keen observer of Gujarat in the period from 2001-2014, when Narendra Modi was chief minister, would hardly be surprised by the above three features. He would immediately recognise that Modi was trying to replicate the Gujarat model at the national level. The same pro-corporate and crony-capitalist policies were implemented by the Modi government in Gujarat. The CAG report for 2012-13 criticised the Gujarat government for providing ‘undue benefits’ of over Rs 750 crore to industrial houses like Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), Essar Steel and Adani Power Ltd (APL), causing grave loss to the state exchequer. The Tata group was given sops of Rs 30,000 crore to shift the Nano car plant from Singur in West Bengal to Sanand in Gujarat. One of the main sops in all these cases was land. As R Ramakumar concluded in The Marxist (January-March 2014), “In 2003 Modi told a summit of investors: ‘If you plant a rupee in Gujarati soil you will get a dollar in return.’ The promise of such returns was accompanied by the actual provision of extraordinary sops, concessions and subsidies to global and domestic investors. A large number of rules and regulations were violated and tweaked to provide such benefits. Land reform laws were amended repeatedly to facilitate the transfer of lakhs of hectares of land to industrial houses at unbelievably cheap rates. In other words, at the base of Gujarat’s industrial growth was the covert and overt transfer of massive amounts of public resources to private corporates. Both the Congress and the BJP in Gujarat were equally complicit in such blatant engineering of transfers, which has been aptly called crony capitalism.” No wonder that in Vibrant Gujarat summits in the beginning of this decade, corporate bosses like Mukesh Ambani, Anil Ambani, Ratan Tata, Sunil Mittal and Gautam Adani fell over one another in singing praises to Narendra Modi. Not only did they sing praises, they also publicised their wish list that the chief minister of Gujarat should soon become the prime minister of India! And with their unstinted support, that is precisely what happened! The price for this had to be paid by the poor in Gujarat. The state has an unenviable record on human development, poverty relief, nutrition and education. Gujarat ranks 13th in India in poverty and 21st in education. 45 per cent of children under five are underweight and 23 per cent are undernourished, putting the state in the ‘alarming’ category on the India State Hunger Index. Due to the resource crunch caused by his largesse to corporates, Modi’s axe in Gujarat inevitably fell on social welfare programmes for the poor. According to political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot, development in Gujarat had been limited to the urban rich and middle class and the upper castes, while the rural and urban poor and the lower castes had become increasingly marginalised. The state ranked 10th among Indian states in the Human Development Index, which he attributed to poor rural development. Jaffrelot said that under Modi the number of families below the poverty line increased and conditions of rural adivasis and dalits, in particular, declined. In July 2013, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen expressed disapproval of Modi's governance record, saying that under his administration Gujarat's "record in education and health care is pretty bad". So far as the communal angle is concerned, the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat led to the slaughter of over 2,000 innocent children, women and men, grave injuries to thousands more, rapes and other unspeakable atrocities on hundreds of women, and the uprooting of innumerable families who lost everything they ever had. These riots have been legitimately described as a pogrom or as state terrorism. The Modi-led BJP state government, its ministers, MPs and MLAs, other organisations of the RSS like the VHP and Bajrang Dal, and large sections of the police and bureaucracy were involved neck-deep in the riots. Summarising academic views on the subject, Martha Nussbaum wrote: “There is by now a broad consensus that the Gujarat violence was a form of ethnic cleansing, that in many ways it was premeditated, and that it was carried out with the complicity of the state government and officers of the law.” Several months after the riots, New York Times reporter Celia Dugger asked Modi if he wished he had handled the riots any differently. He replied that his only regret was not handling the news media better! It must also be remembered that Modi’s hand-picked president of the BJP, Amit Shah, was the minister of state for home in Gujarat. In July 2010, he was arrested and charged in the Sohrabuddin fake encounter case, the killing of his wife and the subsequent murder of a witness. It is this Modi-Shah RSS duo that today runs both the country and its ruling party. The authoritarian and extremely individualist streak in Modi also came to the fore when he was the chief minister of Gujarat. The centralisation of power was his hallmark in Gujarat, too. But much more serious was his ruthless elimination of political rivals. Former chief minister Keshubhai Patel was shunted out and Modi took his place as chief minister in 2001. Subsequently, another former chief minister Suresh Mehta, ex-minister Gordhan Zadafia and ex-MP Harin Pathak were sidelined. An RSS pracharak Sanjay Joshi was driven out of the BJP at Modi’s insistence. The worst fate befell ex-state home minister Haren Pandya, who was removed as minister and MLA, and was then assassinated in mysterious circumstances. Suffice it to say that there is much more than meets the eye in some of these events. One gets a queer déjà vu feeling when looking at all these Modi-led BJP-RSS policies and actions in Gujarat during the last decade and a half. We shall try to analyse in some detail in these columns next week how their replication is now being carried out by the Modi-led BJP regime at the national level. (To be continued)