Mr Infallible?

Indian politics has a penchant for throwing surprises every now and then. With Narendra Modi at the helm, political analysts have only gotten used to more frequent moments of bewilderment. For they have struggled to explain certain trends and results that defy conventional psephological wisdom. One such trend has been the rock solid public approval of PM Modi despite his government’s shambolic handling of multiple crises. 

It almost seemed that Mr. Modi’s connect with the voters was immune to his governance failures. And since we, as a species, live in terms of stories, the story about Narendra Modi went something along these lines: A superhero prime minister and a saviour for Hindus who works day in day out and hardly sleeps. An ascetic driven by the single point agenda of making India great again. If anything goes wrong under his watch, the blame lies squarely either with some anti-national gang or with his ministers or bureaucrats who simply are no match to their master. But Modi can do no wrong. 

However, Modi’s infallible image has taken two back to back hits: first, by the catastrophic mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic’s second wave, and second, by the embarrassing setback in Didi’s Bengal. You may dismiss the latter as a humbling reality check in the business of politics but that would be missing the wood for the trees. For the political capital invested by the BJP and more personally, by Narendra Modi, simply stood unprecedented in Bengal. What makes the outcome even more crucial is the fact that the last three phases of polling coincided with mounting anger and criticism of the Modi government and its handling of the deadly second wave. There is reason and data to believe that public anger reflected on the ballots, handing Mamata Banerjee a final push towards a landslide victory.

But neither Mr. Modi nor the BJP are new to crises. And so they followed the single point SOP on crisis management that has rewarded them handsomely since 2014 i.e. headline management: Oxygen Express made its way to TV screens and so did the decision to open vaccination for all adults aged 18 years and above, and PM Modi cancelled his public rallies in poll bound Bengal. In normal times, this would have been the end of the story or rather the crisis. But something changed this time.

In the past, the tyranny of distance meant a change in headlines sufficed. The Indian middle class would observe things from a distance and continue to live in their secure ivory towers, pretending that nothing happened. And so crisis after crisis, Narendra Modi would produce electoral victories and analysts would scratch their heads. Poor Indians would queue up outside banks for hours during demonetisation, millions would lose their livelihood, and yet Narendra Modi would produce a brute majority in the subsequent UP assembly polls. The complicated GST and cries of small businessmen would not stop Narendra Modi from winning his home state yet again. Hundreds of thousands of migrants would walk back to their villages, hundreds would die a nameless death- some on roads, some on rail tracks- but Mr. Modi’s popularity would remain sky high. After all, Modi can do no wrong.   

But headline management does not work when the middle class starts hurting badly. It does not work when people witness their loved ones dying for lack of medical oxygen and beds in hospitals. It does not work when people queue up outside crematoriums. People’s belief in the messiah has been shaken. He has been caught prioritizing electoral gains over public health. And he can’t fix the blame on others when it was him taking the credit for having proved western prophesies of apocalypse wrong. You can’t blame the opposition either, especially, when even foreign embassies are looking to them for help.  

And so overnight Mr. infallible joins the global list of populist nationalists who fumbled in their response to Covid and are facing public wrath. Americans have already shown the door to Trump, Brazilians are in no mood to see another day of their president Jair Bolsonaro, and Narendra Modi has just been bested in Bengal. Next year, the mother of all electoral prizes- Uttar Pradesh-will go to polls. The same Uttar Pradesh where pleading for oxygen on social media is a crime because the state still believes that all is well. It’s not. 

Mr. Modi may scoff at the western press for aerial shots of India’s crematoriums. He, like his sycophants in Noida’s media hub, may find the truth “too negative”. Blinded by hubris and intoxicated by power, he may not sense the churn in public narrative. But this moment of agony and rage may well be the turning point in our politics. Perhaps, Covid will claim more than just lives.