Tn The spot
Tavleen Singh
What does Nitish Kumar really want? What is it that brings him to Delhi so often these days to make speeches and hold meetings that could just as easily be held in Patna? These are questions I found myself asking more than once as I listened carefully to his most recent speech. He went out of his way to reiterate that he has no prime ministerial ambitions. He said he did not wish to be the sort of prime minister that Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral had been but having said this he then proceeded to sing paeans of praise to himself and what he called the Bihar model of development. He talked of how when he took charge Bihar had been a place where people did not go out and night because of the fear of being kidnapped. He talked of how families huddled together in terror if one member came home later than he should have.
Why does he need to say such things at a national level these days? Why does he need to give speeches about Bihar’s model of ‘inclusive’ development?
When I sat down to analyze these questions I found that they led me to see the Bihar chief minister in an entirely new light. I found myself discovering that beneath the talk of ‘secularism’ and ‘inclusive development’ lurks a man who is as eager to become prime minister as anyone else but because Narendra Modi has already become a national figure before him he is now trying to project himself as the anti-Modi. So because Modi has been unable to shake off the reputation for being anti-Muslim he is projecting himself as someone who Muslims can always rely on. Albeit in a duplicitous way, ‘Sometimes we have to wear a topi and sometimes we wear a tilak.’ And, because Modi’s strength are his economic achievements in Gujarat he is presenting himself as someone who has done as much if not more for Bihar but this has gone unrecognized because in Bihar he had to start from zero.
What Nitish Kumar and his ardent supporters in the national media appear not to have noticed is that Modi has come up with a new economic policy whereas in Bihar there has not been the first sign of anything new. What they have not noticed is that the reason why Modi’s speeches have touched a deep chord in people outside Gujarat is because he is talking of things that make a radical departure from the Nehruvian socialist model that most governments in India have followed faithfully since 1947. Modi is the first political leader in India to dare to say such things as ‘government has no business to be in business’ and emphasize this by describing government’s role as only that of a ‘facilitator’. The other radical departure he has made is to talk of prosperity rather than poverty alleviation. This is very important because it moves away from the Congress idea that India will forever be a poor country in which there will be poverty to alleviate.
By an irony of history Modi has become the first political leader to openly embrace the ideas that Dr. Manmohan Singh implemented when he began the process of economic reform in 1991. He was Finance Minister then in a Congress government but one led by a prime minister who to his dying day continued swore publicly by socialism. In one of the last interviews that P.V. Narasimha Rao gave he almost disowned the economic reforms that began under his leadership by reiterating that he was a socialist and had always been one.
Since 2009 when Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council (NAC) has spoken in more aggressive tones it has forced a return to the economic policies of socialist times in which the state takes charge of creating jobs and running the economy so that it can spend it on vast welfare schemes like MNREGA. What Nitish Kumar has done in Bihar is no different from this old model but, from all accounts, he has run it with more efficiency and less corruption than Mr. and Mrs. Laloo Yadav did.
As someone who has covered Bihar as an itinerant reporter for many years let me tell you that this is no small feat. Bihar was so badly governed before Nitish Kumar became chief minister that there would be times when I got the feeling that things had deteriorated before my very eyes. I remember in particular a quite beautiful Maurya Hotel that the ITC group built in the nineties. Since finding clean sheets and a clean toilet were always a problem in Patna this hotel was a great relief to itinerant reporters like me. So it saddened me deeply to see that when I went back to interview Rabri Devi towards the end of the nineties this fine hotel had deteriorated so seriously that it was no better than the filthy hotels I remembered from older visits to Patna. So if Nitish Kumar has succeeded in ‘putting Bihar back on track’ as he himself put it in his speech last week then he deserves applause. But, does this qualify him to become prime minister? Does it qualify him to claim that he has come up with a ‘Bihar model’?
Personally, I think not and this is because I believe that he brings nothing new by way of ideas and because he has not noticed, as Modi has, that the biggest problem in our fair and wondrous land is governance. Had Nitish Kumar really succeeded in doing for Bihar what Modi has so obviously done for Gujarat he would not be demanding a ‘special status’ for his state he would have been demanding a change in the rules that he thinks have been unfair to Bihar. But, because he has not really thought these things through he comes to Delhi with that tattered old slogan of ‘secularism’ as if it were a new idea. He talks of ‘inclusive development’ without noticing that all growth is automatically inclusive.
If high growth rates were something that benefited only the rich India would not have created in the past twenty years the largest middle class in the world. More than 900 million Indians today would not own cell phones. If there is still terrible poverty it is mostly because of the failure of governance in administering the huge charitable schemes that are so fundamental to the ‘socialist’ ideas of economic development that Nitish Kumar seems to believe in as much as Sonia Gandhi does.
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