India Inc. and Modi

My friend and former colleague, Jyotirmaya Sharma, has written the best piece I've seen on the craven 'Modi for PM' slogans raised by Sunil Mittal, Ratan Tata and Anil Ambani recently:

In a brilliant essay, the philosopher George Steiner once remarked: `It is not only that education has shown itself incapable of making sensibility and cognition more resistant to murderous unreason. Far more disturbing, the evidence is that refined intellectuality, artistic virtuosity and appreciation, scientific eminence will collaborate actively with totalitarian demands or, at best, remain indifferent to surrounding sadism. Resplendent concerts, exhibitions in great museums, the publication of learned books, the pursuit of academic research both scientific and humanistic, flourish within close reach of death-camps. Technocratic ingenuity will serve or remain neutral at the call of the inhuman.’ There could be no better description of the march of the high and mighty in the Indian business world parading before the `leader’ in Gujarat, singing his praises and hailing him as a beacon of hope...

This is where the problem lies: in the concept of `hope’. It signifies a possibly reckless investment, an acquisition, what the stock market would call `futures’. Hope becomes operational only when reward and punishment become subject to a gamble or a lottery, where one operates on the assumptions of `shall’, `will’, `if’, and one clings on to the fiction of a shared hope of progress and one or the other melioristic vision... In such a situation, talking of bringing the perpetrators of Godhra and its aftermath to justice is seen as meaninglessly quibbling over the past. It is here that the most potent phrase in the armoury of the Indian middle classes comes into operation: we must move on. There are, of course, dissenters to this vision of hope. There are those who find a Modi, or an Ambani, a Mittal or a Tata peddling nothing more than a transcendental inference. They are the foes of all those who invest in future tenses. They make us understand what Kafka meant when he said that `there is abundance of hope but none for us’.

The piece appeared in Mail Today. I can't find the online link so I'm providing the full text here...

False Hope

Jyotirmaya Sharma

Why a handful of corporate leaders advocating Narendra Modi’s elevation as prime minister should come as a surprise is itself a surprise. It ought to be dismissed as nothing more than a presumptuous utterance, a bit of wish fulfilment, a naked display of the undemocratic credentials of India Inc. and its ever-increasing hubris. Sections of the Indian middle class, technocrats and corporate leaders love Modi just as the same category of people not too long ago loved Hitler. Remove the blot of the concentration camps from Hitler’s biography, and he becomes the idol for all anti-democratic forces through the ages. His was a model for what is mindlessly called `good governance’ these days. He built the foundations for the industrial infrastructure of modern Germany, built the autobahns, and created the structure for Germany’s military might; he was a vegetarian, loved poetry, painted, liked children, and, in the end, did right by his mistress. The only point of dissonance in this otherwise perfect picture is that good governance without democracy is fascism, and good governance without democracy and devoid of liberal institutions is Stalinism. It is this lack of faith in democracy and liberal institutions that joins a wide array of players in the Indian political spectrum and makes them cohabit merrily in destroying the plural ideas of India.

What India is witnessing is a strange amalgam of the traditional as well as the contemporary re-emergence of corporatism. In the contemporary sense, it reflects an urge to shift the centre of gravity of all politics away from the parliamentary system to the groups that dominate modern industrial and post-industrial societies. Of these, labour increasingly is marginalized as an organized, independent group, and hence leaves corporates, entrepreneurs and the government to stake claims to represent politics. In the older fascist sense, firstly, it means an all-embracing vision of an organic, spiritually unified and morally regenerated society constantly arguing for mutual sacrifice in the national interest. The RSS and the BJP and their model of Hindutva has long represented this sort of ideological vision, conflated in recent times with visions of national regeneration through Hindu consolidation and fighting the enemies of progress. These enemies, according to convenience, could vary from America, Muslims, and Christians to China. Modi, without exception, remains the most eloquent exponent and practitioner of this view. Every blip on the national screen, be it terrorism or a communal riot, adds to the strength of those who seek a leader like Modi who is seen as uncompromising and tough.

Another version of corporatism is one where the argument hinges on leaving the producers of wealth alone to do what they do best but under the aegis of the state. It is a version that calls for self-regulation of the producers of wealth under the guidance of the state. This is a thinly veiled argument for despotism, one that argues for leaving those who run the government and the economy unrestricted run of the country, unencumbered by accountability and transparency. All this is done under the pretext of forging a new form of democracy appropriate for our times. The argument is as follows: The corporatist system alone would make the state structure truly representative by ending a fundamentally divisive parliamentary system based on a system of divisive political parties as well as ethnic, linguistic, and religious identities asserting themselves. A corporatist parliament would represent `natural’ – meaning, thereby, economic – social groups instead of abstract geographical and political ones. Hindutva and its diabolical laboratories would be seen as nationalist symbols rather than sectarian or religious ones. A technocratic-bureaucratic system of this sort would argue for faster reform, liberalization and modernization, all in the delusional name of national grandeur and making India a super power.

In a brilliant essay, the philosopher George Steiner once remarked: `It is not only that education has shown itself incapable of making sensibility and cognition more resistant to murderous unreason. Far more disturbing, the evidence is that refined intellectuality, artistic virtuosity and appreciation, scientific eminence will collaborate actively with totalitarian demands or, at best, remain indifferent to surrounding sadism. Resplendent concerts, exhibitions in great museums, the publication of learned books, the pursuit of academic research both scientific and humanistic, flourish within close reach of death-camps. Technocratic ingenuity will serve or remain neutral at the call of the inhuman.’ There could be no better description of the march of the high and mighty in the Indian business world parading before the `leader’ in Gujarat, singing his praises and hailing him as a beacon of hope. So compelling is the mystique of Modi as someone who can deliver the idea of progress that it now makes even CPM leaders compose panegyrics for the Gujarat leader.

This is where the problem lies: in the concept of `hope’. It signifies a possibly reckless investment, an acquisition, what the stock market would call `futures’. Hope becomes operational only when reward and punishment become subject to a gamble or a lottery, where one operates on the assumptions of `shall’, `will’, `if’, and one clings on to the fiction of a shared hope of progress and one or the other melioristic vision. In the words of these peddlers of hope, the promise of hope becomes the outcome of the wisdom of a few men who think they have seen the `light’ and are now ready to share it with all their less-fortunate brethren. In such a situation, talking of bringing the perpetrators of Godhra and its aftermath to justice is seen as meaninglessly quibbling over the past. It is here that the most potent phrase in the armoury of the Indian middle classes comes into operation: we must move on. There are, of course, dissenters to this vision of hope. There are those who find a Modi, or an Ambani, a Mittal or a Tata peddling nothing more than a transcendental inference. They are the foes of all those who invest in future tenses. They make us understand what Kafka meant when he said that `there is abundance of hope but none for us’.