Peace with Pak won’t fetch votes, win polls

By this time next year, unless Prime Minister Narendra Modi bites the bullet and calls for a surprise mid-term poll within the next 365 days, his government would have completed a shade more than the 60 months that he asked people to give him to reverse 60 years of Congress-led downslide during the 2014 Lok Sabha campaign. Governments have the choice of reserving their best for the second half of their tenure though most successful ones opted for innovation and biggest gambits in the first half and thereafter reaped the harvest. If Mr Modi does not wish to leave things till the last minute before the 2019 elections, 2016 will probably be the year that will either redeem his tenure or herald the period of him becoming a lame-duck Prime Minister.

Among policy thrusts on which the government has invested most, Jan Dhan Yojana, Make in India and Swachh Bharat Abhiyan standout apart as most publicised schemes. Of these, the most tangible results have been achieved in the Jan Dhan Yojana with almost 20 crore bank accounts having been opened by early December. Whether the ruling regime accepts it or not, Zero Balance accounts have become subjects of derision among people. Stories abound of people regularly going to banks to check if they have received any money. Others argue that the scheme is a clever ploy of the Prime Minister to get people to contribute to the government’s corpus because once bank accounts are opened in their names people like to deposit small amounts in these accounts.

When it was first announced, Make in India and Swachh Bharat Abhiyan were extremely appealing ideas. On face value, each scheme that

Mr Modi announced is an extremely good “product” in terms of idea and nomenclature. But the problem is with poor implementation and inability to create appropriate architecture to manage the scheme. In the years that he made a mark as Gujarat chief minister, Mr Modi excelled when it came to tweaking existing systems and ensuring greater efficiency. But barring the 24x7 electricity plan — it still does not have complete coverage — when the domestic feeders were separated from agricultural feeders, most of the schemes were not new.

Mr Modi’s deficiency with creating fresh architecture has been a recurring feature of his premiership too. Take Swachh Bharat Abhiyan — and the toilet-making schemes — for instance. It is a fantastic idea and few would deny that there is a need to alleviate hygiene levels in India. But this cannot be done solely by getting celebrities to mop streets. People can also not be made to use toilets only by constructing loos in houses and school buildings. Attitudes related to defecation are culturally governed among Hindus and some other co-Indian religionists (that is how the Sangh Parivar terms those religions that have their Punya Bhoomi in India). Targets can be met in terms of constructing toilets and organising celebrity drives but till the time there are structural changes in our waste management systems and safai karamcharis at various levels are made stakeholders, no scheme is going to be a success and yield any electoral dividend for the government. Moreover, the government is now charging a Swachh Bharat

cess which means people are paying for services rendered.One of the biggest assets that Mr Modi has lost over the past year is the faith that people reposed in him. In the run up to the Lok Sabha polls, Mr Modi represented hope with which he fuelled aspirations of the people. But after becoming Prime Minister, he was unable to meet the expectations of the people. The great the gap between promise and delivery grew, the more Mr Modi took recourse to spectacular events and managed them. To conclude a rather dismal year, the Prime Minister made a dramatic stop at Lahore to become the first Indian Prime Minister in almost 12 years to step on Pakistani soil. Improving Indo-Pak ties appears to be a priority area of the government given the fact that

Mr Modi is likely to visit Islamabad for the Saarc summit in September. But improving ties with Pakistan will have little impact in electoral terms. To comprehend this, Mr Modi must revisit Atal Behari Vajpayee’s engagement with Islamabad and conclude that while diplomatic engagement with adversarial countries is the hallmark of a statesman, to expect it to generate domestic support is the sign of a leader who doesn’t understand what people want.

Mr Vajpayee had begun his tenure by testing a nuclear bomb but in the Delhi Assembly polls few months later in 1998, soaring onion prices nuked the Bharatiya Janata Party’s chances to such an extent that Sheila Dikshit remained chief minister for three terms. In February 1999,

Mr Vajpayee made sub-continental history by his Lahore yatra but this did not prevent J. Jayalalithaa from toppling his government in a few weeks. A few months later after India won a tightly contested war in Kargil, Lok Sabha polls were held. But despite the military victory, the BJP’s performance remained static and it did not win any additional seats in October 1999.

After two years of diplomatic freeze following the terrorist strike on Parliament, Mr Vajpayee resumed the composite dialogue process in January 2004 yet the BJP was ousted in the parliamentary polls. Clearly, neither war nor peace with Pakistan wins votes. Indira Gandhi may have been likened Durga but this image did not win any poll and she was forced to impose the Emergency because of erosion in domestic support.

If Mr Modi has to reinvent his premiership, he has to buttress his failing domestic constituency and the time couldn’t be more appropriate. This is not going to be an easy task as in states that go to the polls this year the BJP has no realistic chance of performing creditably in any state except Assam. It’s time for Mr Modi to abandon the hoopla and get down to serious governance and focus on issues that will get him votes.

The writer is the author of Narendra Modi: The Man, the Times and Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984