Narendra Modi: The Great Polarizer

By Sandeep Sahu

Midway into his five-year term, Narendra Damodardas Modi‘s record as Prime Minister has been a mixed bag. He has notched up some notable successes and some equally notable failures. On the positive side are a series of initiatives to put some life back into the moribund economy, the mainstreaming of cleanliness as a major national agenda and some deft moves on the foreign affairs front that have raised India’s profile in the international arena. On the negative side, he has failed to live up to his pre-election promise of bringing back trillions of rupees stashed away in foreign shores, his below-the-belt ‘surgical strikes’ against state governments led by Opposition parties (Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Delhi are cases in point) and – last but not the least – his complete failure to rein in the extremist elements within his party.

But there is one area where he has been an unqualified success: polarizing the nation. At least in this respect, he has proved his critics, who had prophesied in the run up to the last Parliamentary elections about his ability to divide people, right. The nation as a whole is split down the middle – between those who would suspend their rational, critical faculties to support him blindly no matter what he does or does not do and those who just cannot accept that he can ever do anything good. No section of society - academia, bureaucracy, media, youth, elderly, women … you name it – is left untouched by the great polarizing power of Modi.

One just has to look at the contrasting ways in which the people are reacting to the demonetization bombshell he dropped on an unsuspecting nation on November 8 to realize how deep is the schism. For everyone who is slamming the move that has caused untold miseries to millions of people across the country, there is someone who is defending it to the hilt. To dismiss the first set as ‘incurable Modi-haters’ or the second as ‘Bhakts’ is to miss the woods for the trees. Perfectly normal people with no affiliation to any party get into no-holds-barred arguments – often with strangers - on Modi and his governance at tea or paan shops, on train journeys or on the social media.

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That Modi evokes extreme reactions among people came to the fore for the umpteenth time the day his 94 (or is it 96) year-old mother Heeraben landed at a bank in Ahmedabad on a wheelchair to exchange some currency just demonetized by her illustrious son. Modi was trolled as much on the streets as on social media for what was dubbed a ‘cheap gimmick’ by many people even as others trolled them for ‘defiling’ the sanctity of motherhood by seeing politics in it!

One is not talking here about the ‘usual suspects’ – the left, liberal intelligentsia with a visceral hatred for Modi and his brand of politics or the ‘andhe bhakts’ who see him as a knight in shining armour, who is destined to rid the country of all that has bedeviled it all these years and – to paraphrase Donald Trump’s election slogan – ‘Make India Great Again’.  One is talking instead about perfectly normal people with no political or ideological affiliations, who are too busy with their mundane life to bother about such things.

In fact, Modi ‘The Polarizer’ has done more. He has made people of a particular persuasion to switch their loyalties - like this relative of mine, who has been a Congress sympathizer all his life but has started singing the ‘Namo’ tune of late. Unlike other politicians, you have to either like him or hate him: there is no half-way house. Such is his power to polarize that even his bitterest critics admit, though only grudgingly, that the BJP would have got anything between 50 and 100 seats less than the numbers it did in the 2014 elections had someone else been the party’s Prime Ministerial candidate.

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Having polarized the electorate before the election, Modi has gone on to polarize particular sections within the population after the polls. He has divided the academia between those who want the status quo to continue and those who want to ‘Indianise’ education, the media between those remain implacably opposed to him and those who rejoice at the formre’s discomfiture, and – I dare say – the BJP between those who see him as a messiah for the party and those who are seriously concerned at his autocratic ways.

Coupled with the visible and not-so-visible attempts to suppress all dissent, this tendency to polarize does not augur well for the nation poised at the threshold of a great leap. Indian economy may continue to do well – as Germany’s did during the reign of the Fuehrer – despite the divisions. But one only has to remember Germany’s fate after World War II to realize that it could also land in disaster, more so given Modi’s all too obvious desire to go down as the man who changed history.