Modi government in a crisis situation as greatest killing field in rural India emerging like tsunami to kill the breaking oil advantage!
Intelligentsia,civil society, Politics,economics and media remain complete detached.
The largest source of employment and livelihood is being killed as the Golden Bird,the mineral India is hunted and Modi launched an unprecedented Sell Off India global campaign with all its Hindutva venom!
Palash Biswas
Photo:Economic Times
Modi government in a crisis situation as greatest killing field in rural India emerging like tsunami to kill the breaking oil advantage!The largest source of employment and livelihood is being killed as the Golden Bird,the mineral India is hunted and Modi launched an unprecedented Sell Off India global campaign with all its Hindutva venom!
Media reports:Unseasonal rains have destroyed over 10 lakh hectares of standing crop across the country. The heavy loss is likely to have an adverse effect on prices of food items which may rise putting the Narendra Modi government in a crisis situation.
Prime Minister Modi launched his Western front for Making in Gujarat and in every CEO conference,Indian Kalki Avtar is screaming for foreign investment may what come!At home,though tumbling oil prices boosted the Bull Run and rating agencies look very generous to paint a rosy scenario of Indian economy fundamentals have not changed a little bit but SEBI taking over RBI.
The agrarian crisis never addressed hitherto might not be resolved with setting populist vote bank equations politically correct as the crisis intensified and Indian farming with its entire rural world seems to be a complete killing field as making in Gujarat has no priority whatsoever for the agrarian crisis.
Today Sunday Economic Times just focused on the emerging greatest ever Killing field with which intelligentsia,civil society,Politics,economics and media remain complete detached.I am posting relevant ET reports with this write up.
Apr 12 2015 : The Economic Times (Kolkata)
Fields of Woe
The unseasonal rain and hail of March are the last straw for India's farmers who have been sitting on a powder keg for some time now
In his Budget speech this February, finance minister Arun Jaitley listed out five challenges ahead of the economy. The first on his list was stress in agricultural incomes. The FM may have had in mind poor productivity, water scarcity, food grain storage and all the allied ills that plague Indian agriculture, but he's unlikely to have anticipated what the Ides of March had in store: unseasonal rains and hailstorms across the country that wreaked havoc on the winter crop. The damage on farms is pushing debtridden farmers beyond the brink.
Last month's burst of unseasonal rain and hail comes on the back of a decline in global commodity prices, including cotton, wheat, basmati rice, sugarcane, tea and rubber over the last year. A few government moves over the past 12-18 months haven't helped either. "MNREGA [the rural employment guarantee scheme] has been severely curtailed, crop procurement has been restricted and states have been asked not to give bonuses via an executive order from the central government. This has deepened the agrarian crisis across the countryside and we can expect a much higher rate of farmers' suicides in the coming months," says Biraj Patnaik, principal adviser to the commissioners of the Supreme Court. Not surprisingly, sowing has declined in both the kharif season (by 2.3 million hectares) and the current rabi season (by 4 million hectares).
The even bigger worry is that the agriculture sector in India is stuck in a long drawn-out crisis. The primary problem is structural -agriculture contributes just 14% to GDP but employs 49% of the workforce, a situation that is unsustainable. About 80% of Indian farmers are small and marginal; as a result their cost of production is much higher.
The problem of Indian agriculture calls for a longterm solution. In the immediate term, though, lakhs of farming households across the country -as the reports over the next pages will tell you -are crying out for a helping hand, and more. Read on:
Apr 12 2015 : The Economic Times (Kolkata)
The Land of Invisible Suicides
KP Narayana Kumar
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Deaths of farmers in UP's Bundelkhand region are accidental, insists the state, and not due to distress caused by unseasonal rains
Vikram Singh remembers the last days of his elder brother Jitendra with clarity. Thirty five-year-old Jitendra was a farmer who lived in a remote village in Jalaun district in southwest Uttar Pradesh. The district is situated in the drought-prone Bundelkhand region which has been fighting acute agricultural distress for the past decade. This year, Jitendra was more optimistic about life than in earlier years when he had to suffer losses repeatedly on account of drought. He expected a decent harvest and planned to marry off his eldest daughter. Jitendra even found a suitable boy from the neighbouring village and fixed a tentative date in May. But then Bundelkhand was hit by unseasonal rains and hailstorm in the last week of March. When Jitendra visited his farm he found that his pea crop was washed away."Since that day, Jitendra stopped talking to anyone in the family and locked himself up in his room," says Vikram.
Earlier this week, Jitendra hanged himself in his room. "He had given his word to the bridegroom's family. The humiliation led him to commit suicide," said Vikram. The farmer is survived by four children and his wife.
State Apathy
In another village nearby, the relatives of an other farmer are mourning too. Mahavir Singh saw the destruction caused by the unseasonal rains and collapsed on the field. By the time his relatives carried him home, he was dead.
Mahavir had also planned to marry off his daughter post-harvest. Both farmers had piled up debts due to the frequent spells of drought. Stories of farmers committing suicide or dying of heart attacks on the field have be come fairly commonplace in the region. Conversations between farmers from different villages begin with "another one gone today". The local newspapers also report these incidents regularly. So it appears strange that the only people who do not appear to have any knowledge about these deaths are the local district administration and the state government officials who operate out of Lucknow.The district collector as well as the chief secretary of the state have issued statements to the effect that they were yet to receive information about farmer suicides in the region.
Villagers here say their lives are now peren nially dedicated to settling the debts and when they are unable to do so, they take the hard way out. Typically, a farmer takes loans through the Kisan Credit Card (KCC) scheme and, when he is unable to pay back, he takes additional loans from local moneylenders.
When the crop fails as badly as it has this time, he finds that no one from the adminis tration even bothers to assess the damage to the crop. This means that the insurance mon ey due to him rarely materializes and the compensation too is awarded after lengthy paperwork. Devoid of support from the gov ernment agencies at this point, dozens of farmers in the region have taken the extreme step of killing themselves.
Talking to ET Magazine, more than 30 villagers in Jalaun said they are also harassed by the police department when they are unable to repay loans. "Even as we get picked up by the police, the moneylenders' goons will be waiting for us when we get back from the police station," said a farmer.
The KCC scheme is supplemented with crop insurance, the premium for which is deducted by the banks concerned and deposited with the insurance companies associated with the scheme.
The KCC scheme is aimed at providing timely and affordable credit to farmers in India.The scheme was started in 1998-99. It allows farmers to have cash credit facilities without going through time-consuming bank credit screening processes. The card is issued on the basis of land held by the farmer and he needs to pro vide documentation for the same as security.
The card is valid for three years and is subject to annual renewals. Withdrawals are made using slips, cards and a passbook. The premium for crop insurance is deducted automatically from the farmer's account.
End of the Road?
Lalita Prasad, 67, says he speaks for the entire village when he points out that he has never received any award through the insurance scheme although he has suffered losses more than once. Two dozen farmers who surround him nod their heads in approval.
Research conducted by ET Magazine threw up three broad trends, all of which suggest that the farmer suicides are on account of the callousness of the administration. Firstly, the political leadership has not put any pressure on the bureaucracy to verify the reports of suicides. Secondly, the senior officials entrusted with the job at the district level have not issued instructions to the lower-ranking officials such as lekhpals (who prepare assessment reports) to visit the farmers and assess damages promptly. Finally, farmers say, the lekhpal does not process a file without taking a bribe.
"Even if the case is that of an impoverished family seeking compensation after the head of the family has committed suicide, the field officers will ask for their cut. From getting a bank loan to assessment of crop loss, your work gets done only after a minimum of 10% of the amount is handed over to the officials," says a farmer who did not wish to be named.
According to Sanjay Singh, an activist with Parmarth, an NGO based out of Jhansi, the first thing required in Bundelkhand to fight rural distress is a massive anti-corruption campaign. "We need something like the anti-corruption helpline started in Delhi."
According to Singh the laborious verification process has made life difficult for the farmers. "When you know there has been loss, why don't you just pay the compensation taking into account the aggregate loss and size of farms? Why do you need to do so much of individual verification? This is opening the door for corruption," said Singh.
The activist, who has been campaigning against rural distress in Bundelkhand for over a decade, says the lekhpals collect around `1,000 per crop failure report. "On an average there would be around a hundred reports that need to be drafted in a village and they get to pocket around `1 lakh per village just for assessing the damage. Those who don't pay simply do not figure in the process," he added.
A manager with a leading bank that issues KCCs agreed that the follow-up on insurance claims by the companies concerned was below par. "The farmers themselves have no clue about how they can get their claim. No awareness pro grammes have been conducted to educate them about how the loss is computed and claims processed. If we need to improve the efficacy of the programme, the farmer needs to know that he has a right to his claim."
Anil Sharma, a representative of the Association for D e m o c r a t i c Re forms who has been documenting the in efficacy of institutions in these parts, says there are many villages where people do not know how the government functions and what their basic rights are. "People do not get any help from the government. To make matters worse, climate change is beginning to cause a severe impact on agriculture so much so that we can say that farming could well be dying a slow death," said Sharma.
Sharma says illegal mining is responsible for the severe swing in climate in the region ."The green cover in this area has been destroyed and this is because the political system makes money through mining. Years of cutting trees and over-exploitation of resources and destruction of the hills have contributed to the severity of the situation here," says Sharma.
Changing Climate
Some estimates suggest that as many as 100 farmers may have committed suicide in Bun delkhand till April this year. Due to the re petitive cycles of misery, a large number of farmers have migrated to Delhi and other towns in North India in search of work.
Just when, after several dry spells, it looked as if things couldn't get worse, farmers were greeted with their harvest being washed away by untimely rains and hail. "The lekh pal had visited our house and he knows that my brother committed suicide. I don't know why he did not prepare a report and send it to the government or how the government can claim that they don't know about the sui cides," says the relative of a farmer who com mitted suicide a fortnight ago.
The Uttar Pradesh government said that damage to crops had spread to 40 districts and said the monetary losses were now up wards of `1,100 crore. UP chief secretary Alok Ranjan, however, maintained that none of the deaths of farmers reported since late March this year were suicides and classified them as accidental deaths caused by light ning and other such. "There is no conclusive proof yet that any of the suicides that have been reported have anything to do with un seasonal, heavy rains," he said.
The farmers are angry with the state gov ernment for the lack of urgency shown to meet the challenge of rural distress. They are also unhappy with the Centre for not moving fast enough to come to their aid."We had huge expectations from the Narendra Modi government. But they are nowhere to be seen after the elections," said Raghubir, a farmer from Mahoba village.According to the 27-year-old youngster, making announcements on compensation alone will not be enough. "The state govern ment is not doing anything. The Cen tre needs to play a more decisive role. But if they just announce com pensation without ensuring that the state bureaucracy plays its role in computing losses and processing files, it will be of no use. The farmers of the region desperately need the Narendra Modi we were promised. I hope he will take charge and ensure some action is taken on the ground."
Business Standard reports the alarming scenario:
With unseasonal rain and hail threatening to damage 5-10 per cent of the standing crop, traders and private flour millers have signed contracts to import 70,000-80,000 tonnes of wheat.
"Traders have entered into contracts to import wheat as there is a fear that much of high-quality fresh wheat, used by flour mill owners, might have been damaged in the recent rains, mainly in Madhya Pradesh," an official from a leading global trading firm told Business Standard.
He added the development might be out of concern over the damages and might not become a trend in the coming days, as grain stocks in state-run warehouses are much more than required.
Purchases by India, the world's second largest wheat consumer and producer, could push global wheat prices, which have rallied six per cent in the past two sessions on the Chicago Board of Trade.
A Reuters report said flour millers had purchased 70,000-80,000 tonnes of Australian prime wheat for April-May shipment at $260-$265 a tonne, including cost and freight.
Last week, the Union government had lowered its estimate of crop damage in the recent rain and hail across several states, following a meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and officials from the affected states.
According to the government's revised estimates, standing rabi crops in 10.67 million hectares of land has been damaged in the recent rains and hailstorm, which is 17.26% of the total rabi acreage of cereals. The preliminary estimate had cited the figure as 18.1 million hectares.
While wheat suffered the most damage, the extent of damage in the revised estimates is much lower than the preliminary report - at 6.3 million hectares and 12.1 million hectare, respectively.
This damage estimate also includes horticulture crops such as onion, mango, grapes, and banana, which was also the case during the earlier preliminary assessment done by the agriculture ministry.
Stocks lying with the state-run Food Corporation of India totalled 19.52 million tonnes on March 1, which is substantially higher than a target of four million tonnes. However, some of the older stocks - two years and above - might be of lower quality. In addition to the rain-damage, Indian millers are also importing because of global freight rates, which plunged to a record low last month, the Reuters report said.
Money Control reports:
India has bought up to 80,000 tonnes of Australian wheat in recent deals, three trade sources said on Tuesday, the biggest such imports by the country in five years as unseasonal rains damage the crop at home. Purchases by the Fworld's No.2 wheat consumer and producer could buoy benchmark Chicago prices , which rallied more than 6 percent in the past two sessions and are currently near a one-week top amid concerns over dry weather and rising temperatures hurting the US winter crop. Indian flour millers have bought between 70,000 and 80,000 tonnes of Australian prime wheat for April-May shipment at USD 260-USD 265 a tonne, including cost and freight. "They have bought three cargoes as some mills are taking coverage because of reports of rain damage," said one Singapore-based trading manager with an international trading company. "We don't expect India to buy large volumes as they have substantially large stocks but there could be some demand for higher grade wheat." India imported around 200,000 tonnes of wheat in 2010, US Department of Agriculture data shows, and purchases since then have been low because of bumper domestic production. But wheat output and overall crop quality is seen taking a hit this year following heavy, untimely rain in northern and central grain-growing parts of India just before the harvest. Traders said the top high-protein wheat producing states of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan have seen worst damage. While it is too early to estimate the extent of damage to the wheat crop, winter crops in more than 10 million hectares could be hit, government officials said. India could be in the market for more shipments although large stockpiles in government silos may cap purchases. Stocks lying with the state-run Food Corporation of India totalled 19.52 million tonnes on March 1, substantially higher than a target of 4 million tonnes. Still, some of the stocks, which are more than two-year old, may be of average to lower quality. In addition to the rain-damage, Indian millers are importing also because of global freight rates that plunged to a record low last month. "At times some port-based flour millers in southern India import high-protein wheat from Australia to take advantage of freight rates and lower global prices," said Prem Gupta, a senior member of the Roller Flour Millers Association of India. "If international prices are lower, it becomes economical to import rather than get cargoes transported from the main production centres in central or northern parts of India."
The Globeandmail reports:
In the fading days of India's last administration, it was easy to locate the country's top bureaucrats: They were usually down at the Delhi Golf Club in the heart of the capital, thwacking balls past the historic course's imposing Mughal-era tombs. Starting early in the morning, senior civil servants could sneak in a round before making the short journey from the course – which was founded during the British Raj – to nearby government offices in time for a mid-morning start.
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At the time, the Indian National Congress government was embroiled in several high-profile corruption scandals, and ordinary government business had essentially stopped. Bureaucrats and ministers sat on files, afraid to approve anything that might get them in trouble. India had gone from being the world's most promising emerging market to a dysfunctional mess.
Last May, a frustrated, tired nation voted in droves for a regime change and a tough new prime minister: Narendra Modi.
Nearly a year after he took power, tee time is officially over: Honorary golf-club memberships have been cancelled, government employees sign in on tablets that display their attendance on a public website, and newly enlivened bureaucrats are finally stamping files again. "The Delhi Golf Club is like a ghost town now," says Harjeet Bajaj, a Canadian businessman who manages various projects in India.
Mr. Modi's election was nothing short of historic: The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) he leads won the most decisive electoral majority in 25 years in this country of more than 1.2 billion people. His victory demolished the venerable Congress Party's hold on parliament, ending a long string of fragile coalition governments that had become paralyzed by corruption and constantly shifting political alliances.
After a year in office, Mr. Modi has brought stability to the capital, optimism to the business community and momentum to foreign relations, with frequent trips abroad to foster renewed faith in his country – including a forthcoming one to Canada. Mr. Modi will arrive here for a three-day visit on Tuesday, during which he will meet Prime Minister Stephen Harper, financial leaders and Indo-Canadian groups. Among his specific goals: inking a major deal with Cameco Corp. to secure a steady source of uranium to meet India's growing nuclear-energy needs.
Though he started his term with huge expectations, Mr. Modi has proved more cautious and incremental than many had expected. He's slowly repairing damage wreaked by previous governments' corruption, while avoiding big-ticket reforms and instead tinkering around the margins: lifting foreign-direct-investment restrictions here, slashing education and social spending there, and allotting new funds to select infrastructure projects. He has also launched an ambitious program to encourage global firms to manufacture their products in India – a scheme that may take years, but that his government hopes will bring millions of well-paying jobs to a country where the majority of people struggle as farmers, urban labourers or small-time shopkeepers.
There are signs of progress: The country's GDP is predicted to rise to 7.5 per cent this year, after hovering around five per cent in the previous two years.
But Mr. Modi's promises of sweeping economic development remain largely unrealized: Factories have not begun to spring up, and there are no gleaming new highways. Few expected instantaneous change, but even some who welcomed Mr. Modi's election see little evidence that he is making a difference. The stock market may be soaring, but India still ranks 142nd out of 189 countries in terms of ease of doing business. And although Mr. Modi has got the government moving again, India is a massive, complicated country. Many of its poorest have seen little improvement since his election.
There are other concerns, as well. Those who feared the ardent Hindu nationalist would be unable to control his party's more radical elements cite a resurgence of religious prejudice, and sometimes religiously motivated violence. Others worry about increased restrictions on civil society, and inaction on social issues such as women's rights.
To create the millions of jobs his nation desperately needs, Mr. Modi will need to implement deeper, structural reforms. He has had a year to settle in. Now, India wants real change.
From chai stand to parliament
Mr. Modi is the most polarizing mainstream politician in modern India. Unlike most of the nation's political class, he grew up poor, in the dusty town of Vadnagar in the rural state of Gujarat, selling tea from his father's chai stand near the local railway station. He eventually drifted into the radical Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), where he began working as one of the giant volunteer organization's propagandists, leaving behind the woman his parents had arranged for him to marry, and living an austere, solitary life, wandering for years as an ascetic in the Himalayas.
The RSS, which feeds the now-ruling BJP with many of its top leaders, has long been associated with the violent, khaki-shorts-wearing foot soldiers of the Hindu nationalist – or Hindutva – movement. Mr. Modi, too, joined the BJP. He rose through the party's ranks, eventually becoming Gujarat's chief minister; as the state's leader, he served four consecutive terms, winning each election more decisively than the last.
It was in his 12 years as chief minister that Mr. Modi shaped his reputation as a pro-business autocrat who ran a clean government. He simplified the approval process for new businesses and wooed companies to set up factories in Gujarat with cheap land, low-interest loans, and promises of reliable supplies of power and water. Bombardier and McCain have plants there, as does Ford. Famously, Ratan Tata decided to move a planned manufacturing plant for his new Tata Nano car from another state to Gujarat after he received a text message from Mr. Modi.
His record in other areas is more troubling. Like others in the BJP, Mr. Modi was not afraid to use religious tensions to his political advantage: His state government resisted giving compensation and housing to survivors of Gujarat's infamous 2002 riots, in which more than 1,000 people, mainly Muslims, were killed in vicious religious violence. He once likened resettlement camps for displaced Muslims to baby-making factories.
Mr. Modi was cleared – by a Supreme Court-monitored special investigation team – of complicity in the attacks, but some believe he can never be fully exculpated, citing his inaction as the riots unfolded: Police often stood by while people were killed, or helped abet the killing. In the years since, Mr. Modi has never apologized.
An unfinished economic revolution
People talk about India as an economic success story only because of reforms introduced in 1991, when the Congress government brought into being a dramatic liberalization process – one that makes Mr. Modi's efforts so far look timid by comparison. The government effectively dismantled the so-called Permit Raj of rigid licences, import approvals and other legacies of India's socialist postcolonial period. The reforms unleashed the country's talented business class, and growth soared. Indian universities now churn out a steady stream of brilliant software engineers, scientists and globally competitive business people.
Over the next decade, many new businesses surged: call centres, back-office outsourcing, and eventually more advanced research industries in pharmaceuticals and technology in southern cities such as Bangalore and Hyderabad; as well as some manufacturing around cities such as Chennai – a car-making hub – and Gujarat's Ahmedabad, which both have access to ports. But it was an unfinished, and unequal, revolution. The services sector, which now accounts for half of India's GDP, employs a comparatively small segment of the country's vast population.
India has the second-largest labour force in the world – about 500 million people – but roughly half of them work in the fields, on unproductive small plots of farmland that have been subdivided over generations. While the country has world-class institutes of technology and management, it also has an abysmal record of giving children a basic education, partly because of resistance from rural Indians, who want their children to work rather than go to school. Many businesses also complain that graduates from all but the elite colleges and universities have few usable skills, and can require up to six months of training before being ready for work.
Which is why Mr. Modi is casting a much wider net in his quest for economic development – for example, by pushing for hundreds of millions of Indians to open bank accounts, so that the central government can transfer subsidies to them directly rather than through corrupted middlemen.
Making things, to make jobs
Between 1997 and 2011, India's economy grew on average at around 7 per cent a year. But even while the economy was surging and some sectors were on the upswing, there was no commensurate gain in the industrial-scale, export-oriented manufacturing that propelled China's masses out of poverty.
There are several reasons for this. Outside of India's big cities, the roads are often flooded, potholed and gridlocked with bullock carts. Ports, railways and other infrastructure are in terrible shape, making it costly to move goods around the country: It is often cheaper to ship something from Mumbai to Africa than to ship it within India. Power cuts are a regular occurrence, contracts are essentially unenforceable, legal disputes can take several decades to wind through India's clogged court system, regulation has been unpredictable, corruption has been a problem at all levels of government, and acquiring land for new projects can take years.
In contrast to the services industry, where companies can simply move into pre-existing real estate, industrial firms in particular can't easily purchase plants – and since they often require more land, equipment, power and other supplies than do businesses such as research labs, manufacturing has been particularly stunted. The World Bank ranks India 184th out of 189 nations in "dealing with construction permits" – making it literally one of the worst places in the world to build something.
Changing this state of affairs is one of Mr. Modi's priorities. And it seems to be working. "The biggest change is hope," says Shailesh Pathak, executive director of the Bhartiya Group, an Indian conglomerate that spans fashion and real-estate. "Last year, the feeling was despair. This year, it is hope."
Mr. Modi is making a concerted effort to improve India's manufacturing sector – acknowledging, in the process, that economic progress, without jobs, is not the way forward. "What we need is not just more production," he has said, "but mass production and production by masses."
Inside a complex of cream-coloured government buildings in New Delhi, Amitabh Kant is a man besieged. It is 6:30 p.m. on March 31 – the last day of India's fiscal year – and a half-dozen people are waiting outside his office. He has to catch a flight to China, but the phone keeps ringing, and a staffer has just dumped three overflowing manila envelopes in front of Mr. Kant, who is secretary of India's department of industrial policy and promotion within the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. "I'll miss my flight if I don't clear these," he says, removing his glasses and rubbing his nose with his thumb and index finger. "I don't have time for a long Q&A."
Mr. Kant is the man responsible for Mr. Modi's "Make in India" campaign, a high-profile initiative to convince the world's manufacturers to build their products on the subcontinent. It aims to boost manufacturing in 25 key sectors, from transportation, mining, electronics and chemicals to biotechnology, food processing and wellness. The campaign includes practical measures – the government recently revamped import duties on electronics, doubling the fees for finished devices, while cutting the duty on components to zero – but the biggest focus has been on outreach.
In addition to that campaign, Mr. Modi has begun to dismantle the vestiges of more than 60 years of socialist state policies, selling off stakes in public companies, opening some sectors to foreign investment, and abolishing India's Planning Commission, a 500-person group that churned out Soviet-style five-year economic plans under successive Congress governments. He is now also embroiled in a political battle to significantly alter India's arduous land-acquisition policy. While Congress and other liberals see this as a corporate land grab, Mr. Modi and the BJP say they want to make it easier for businesses and government to buy land from farmers for factories, roads and other infrastructure projects.
There are some indications that this emphasis on manufacturing is beginning to have an impact. The Canadian electronics company Datawind, for instance, which makes inexpensive smartphones and tablets for the Indian market, announced that it would relocate production from Chinese factories to India now that import duties have been changed. "This will shift manufacturing to India," says Suneet Singh Tuli, Datawind's chief executive officer, who has pledged to create roughly 1,000 new jobs in the country.
Other global gadget makers are also said to be looking at opening factories. And the foreigners' registration office in New Delhi is full of Japanese nationals representing huge companies such as Sharp and Mitsubishi, seeking new countries in which to invest.
Fomenting dissent
Down a series of back alleyways off the main road – past butchers of beef and lamb, and motorcycles negotiating the narrow laneways with shrieking horn blasts – a school in a Muslim neighbourhood of Muzaffarnagar, in the poor northern state of Uttar Pradesh, sits beside a flowing canal of raw sewage. The city of about a half-million people is just a three-hour drive north of New Delhi. Nearby, children play cricket on a field of garbage. A clean hit sends the ball sailing into an open sewer. A boy runs over, picks it out with his bare hand, and throws it back to his friends.
Shandar Ghufran, headmaster of the 600-student school and a community activist, points to a new elevated entranceway and a small brick wall with three concrete steps at the front door; they were recently built to prevent sewage from flowing into the school when it rains. Others in the predominantly Muslim neighbourhood are not so lucky: Their homes are flooded with filthy, disease-carrying water when the rains are heavy. Mr. Ghufran says that no Hindu student has ever applied to come here, and that Muslim students applying elsewhere in the city are regularly turned away.
Since Mr. Modi's election victory, Mr. Ghufran says, already-simmering tensions in Muzaffarnagar have gotten worse. Urban-development funds, he says, seem to have stopped flowing to Muslim communities. Posters have gone up in alleyways imploring Hindu women to bear more children, playing on the Hindu right's constant refrain that Muslims have larger families. Other posters have gone up, too, reading "Long Live Nathuram Godse" – a reference to Mahatma Gandhi's assassin, a one-time member of the RSS, who shot India's pacifist icon for appeasing India's Muslims around the time of Partition. "The pressure is building," Mr. Ghufran says.
Muslims have a long history in India, and the present population is enormous: about 180 million. But more than 80 per cent of Indians are Hindu; and so it doesn't hurt Mr. Modi politically to ignore Muslims or to inflame tensions. Conversely, making concessions to India's Muslim communities could result in a significant backlash from the BJP, the RSS and hardline Hindu volunteers and supporters.
Muzaffarnagar and its surrounding villages exploded with anti-Muslim riots in 2013 – violence that led to more than 60 deaths and caused tens of thousands of Muslims to be displaced from their homes. It was one of the worst incidents of religious violence since the Gujarat riots of 2002.
Amit Shah, president of the BJP and a close confidant of Mr. Modi, visited the city during the 2014 election campaign – and besought the area's Hindus to get revenge on local Muslims by voting for his party. Although Mr. Shah was subsequently censured by India's Election Commission, he remains close to the Prime Minister, even as Mr. Modi himself has toned down his own comments in recent years, after international condemnation of the Gujarat riots.
Amir Khan, a 55-year-old Muslim cloth merchant who operates a roadside shop in Muzaffarnagar, says that since Mr. Modi took office he has seen his business drop by about 85 per cent. "I used to get a lot of [Hindu] Jat customers," he says. "Now, there are not many who come here. It started after the riots. But after the elections it got even worse."
The Muslims who were driven from their homes in Muzaffarnagar have been left with little recourse. In early April, The Globe and Mail visited Uttar Pradesh's Shamli district, where a ragged, morose group was dismantling two large displacement camps after local officials had arrived that morning with bulldozers to evict them – two years after the riots, they still don't have a home.
Riyahat Meerhasan, a wizened 60-year-old man with nine children, had his house destroyed in the riots and was piling bricks one by one into a horse-drawn cart. He and many others here say they are petrified of returning to their villages, where their homes and possessions were left behind. Says Mr. Meerhasan, "I don't know where I'm going to go now."
None of these displaced villagers has received any compensation from either the state or central government. Human Rights Watch has demanded that authorities stop the forced evictions, properly investigate the violence and provide aid. But the only relief seems to have come from a nearby Muslim farmer, Haji Dilshad, who donated his land to build permanent dwellings with funding from the Al Falah trust in the United Kingdom. But even he faced hurdles: The local government tried to prevent him from building the structures on his land, he says, because a permanent refugee community of concrete homes would be proof of how widespread the displacement actually was.
Out here, Mr. Modi's India is not changing: It remains as polarized, poor and underdeveloped as ever.
The riots were rooted in the movement that fuelled Mr. Modi's rise, but none of the displaced Muslims I spoke with expressed any anger at their new prime minister. They simply wanted to send him a message as he makes another of his frequent trips abroad. "He has all the power. He controls the government. If he wants to, he could help us. He could put a roof over our heads. That's my request," says Saddam, who did odd jobs in local villages before he fled to the camp. "I hope you will communicate our plight to the Modi government as he visits Canada."
Christians in the crosshairs
In addition to Muslim communities, India's Christians – who make up 2.3 per cent of the population – have also felt besieged under Mr. Modi. In New Delhi late last year, there were a number of attacks on churches. In February, several men forced their way into a convent and school in West Bengal and over the course of two hours raped a nun and desecrated the chapel.
Just last week, the discrimination even hit a Supreme Court judge – Kurian Joseph, a Christian – who was reprimanded by the Chief Justice after refusing to attend a judicial conference, that included a meeting with the Prime Minister, because it took place over Easter Weekend. Mr. Joseph, alluding to the fact that such events would never be held on Hindu holidays, penned a letter to Mr. Modi, asking him, as "the guardian of Indian secularism," to "benevolently show equal importance and respect to the sacred days of all religions."
In December, one Bharatiya Janata Party MP suggested that the nation celebrate "Good Governance Day" on Dec. 25 in honour of former BJP Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's birthday – another obvious offence.
John Dayal, the secretary-general of the All India Christian Council, says that while Hindu nationalists tend to view Indian Muslims as potential secret agents for Pakistan, they also worry that Christians are secretly trying to convert the more than 167 million lower-caste Dalits (formerly known as Untouchables), as well as indigenous, or so-called tribal, people in remote areas, to Christianity.
In early February, while protesting the government's silence over the issue, Mr. Dayal and dozens of other Christian activists and nuns were detained by police. "We've always had a base level of violence against Christian and Muslim communities under different governments," Mr. Dayal says. "The RSS, when another party is in power, is more surreptitious. But when their own government is in power, they become fearless."
The end of the honeymoon
In February, Mr. Modi's long victory streak finally ended. After winning elections repeatedly since the early 2000s – in Gujarat as chief minister, in the national elections of 2014, and then with several party triumphs in state-level elections, Mr. Modi's surge came to a spectacular halt in state elections in New Delhi. Despite campaigning personally, Mr. Modi's BJP was defeated by the Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party, which grew out of India's recent anti-corruption movement and promised cheap or free water and electricity. Of Delhi's 70 seats, AAP won 67 – just nine months after being routed by the BJP in the national elections.
Mr. Modi's critics saw this as a clear sign of dissatisfaction with India's direction under the BJP leader, while supporters downplayed the loss, saying the BJP was punished for refusing to promise economically unsustainable government services. Either way, the loss was a high-profile setback for Mr. Modi and his party.
This has been compounded by other public stumbles. When U.S. President Barack Obama visited India in January, Mr. Modi greeted him in a suit with pinstripes made up of his name – Narendra Damodardas Modi – repeated over and over again. It was widely mocked as politically tone deaf.
More seriously, Mr. Modi has been criticized for being slow to address a mounting agricultural crisis. Heavy rains have destroyed many winter crops in northern India's fertile plains, and there have been suicides as the government failed to step in and compensate farmers. In rural Uttar Pradesh, standing at the edge of a flooded field, an 80-year-old Muslim labourer named Wazir, who has worked on the farm all his life, offers a grim verdict on Mr. Modi's first year in power: "He looks out for the industrialists only. He has done nothing so far."
On a narrow patio off the laneway office of the Centre for Equity Studies in south Delhi, Harsh Mander is enjoying the mild spring weather as a woman pulls down laundry from an adjacent rooftop. A social activist who resigned from the Indian civil service over the Gujarat riots, he has just eyed proofs for his new book on inequality and indifference in India – a book in which Mr. Modi appears multiple times.
To Mr. Mander and other social activists, Mr. Modi's promises of development ring hollow. "There's nothing in the growth model that actually provides jobs. That is going to be the Achilles heel of this government," Mr. Mander says. "For a big percentage of people, life is as hopeless as it ever was."
He's not the only one who is skeptical. Many of India's liberals and intellectuals, who are living through dark days after Congress's defeat, remain broadly disillusioned with Mr. Modi's plan.
Saumitra Chaudhuri, a former member of India's Planning Commission and an economic adviser to the last prime minister, says Mr. Modi has struggled because of his new government's inexperience. And he agrees with critics such as Mr. Mander that the Prime Minister is promising something that he never delivered in Gujarat: jobs. "There are no labour-intensive industries in Gujarat," Mr. Chaudhuri says over a whisky and soda at the India International Centre, a cultural hub in Delhi. "He just wants industry. But not jobs."
Activists also worry that, under Mr. Modi, civil society is getting squeezed. The government is giving extra scrutiny to foreign-funded environmental NGOs, such as Greenpeace, which it blames for stalled development projects. And just a few days ago, the Prime Minister made controversial remarks about "five-star activists" clogging up the judicial system, adding to the ominous sense that Mr. Modi's India may be becoming less tolerant of vibrant democratic debate.
Recently, the government also banned the documentary India's Daughter, by a British director, about a prominent New Delhi rape case, despite Mr. Modi's strident rhetoric about protecting Indian women. Charu, a medical student who only felt comfortable providing her first name to a journalist, says Mr. Modi does not back up his talk with action and has only paid "lip service" to women's safety in India. "I don't feel like Modi has done anything, he is talking only," she says. "It's not safe."
To Sunayana Walia, a women's rights activist from Gujarat, these developments are all too familiar. When her work brought her into contact with Muslim survivors of the Gujarat riots, her organization – SEWA, the Self-Employed Women's Association – found a project's funding abruptly cut off. And a national program through which NGOs helped run crisis centres for women was recently shut down, she says. "This stuff was already happening in Gujarat, but now one sees glimpses at the national level," she says. "It's making people very nervous."
What next?
Although Mr. Modi has a majority in India's lower house, or Lok Sabha, this does not enable him to implement a truly ambitious agenda. Under India's bicameral system, he also needs to win state-level elections, because it is possession of those state legislatures that gives parties advantage in the upper house, the Rajya Sabha.
The BJP is currently outnumbered in the upper house, which means that Mr. Modi's big-ticket reforms could stall unless he is permitted to call a rare joint session of the two houses – or he wins more state elections.
And that's important, because it is at the state level that businesses run into the most frustrations. Dinesh Singhal, who runs a big industrial business in the city of Meerut, applied one year ago to the state government of Uttar Pradesh to get permission to expand his plant. "I would have had to give a big bribe, which I am not giving, then I would get approved," says Mr. Singhal, the CEO of Kanohar Electricals, as the power goes out in his office. "The states are not serious. They take money and eat it up. They are not concerned about manufacturing or jobs."
For the Prime Minister, says Ambarish Datta, the CEO of the BSE Institute, a training arm of the Bombay Stock Exchange, the real work of his five-year term begins now. "Sentiment is good. Investor inflows are high. But people now want to see action on the field," he says. "The last year is doling out freebies and basically preparing for another election. And the first year is settling in."
"It's a little like cricket," he adds. "The real action is in the middle."
Shilan Shah, an India economist with the London-based research firm Capital Economics Ltd., says that Mr. Modi has made some progress on easing regulations and opening up some sectors – such as defence, insurance, and railways – to foreign investment, but that he has underwhelmed the market on the "really big-bang reforms."
He has not opened up the much larger financial and retail sectors to foreign competition – with retail, in particular, being politically sensitive in a nation with so many grocers and hawkers.
Another key area in need of reform: labour-market regulation, which is governed by a complicated system of roughly 200 laws at both the national and state levels. These prevent large-scale manufacturing, by making it necessary for firms with more than 100 employees to seek government approval for firing people. As a result, companies resort to hiring off the books. "The upshot to all of this is that the economy should slowly recover over the next few years," Mr. Shah says. "But growth will probably fall short of India's immense potential."
Vinod Sawhny, a prominent business executive in Mumbai, sees many of the current political difficulties as an extension of the sheer magnitude of Mr. Modi's task: trying to wrench India out of an economy – and a political system – that still treats, and seeks to preserve, India as a nation of farmers and villages. Taking full advantage of the country's demographic dividend – every second Indian is below the age of 25 – and turning the country into a manufacturing– and service-based economy is going to require a "a huge mindset change," he says. Not to mention more than just one year.
"We have a golden opportunity," Mr. Sawhny says. "The next 24 months will determine whether a new India takes shape. It will be an absolute lost opportunity if we don't prove it. The time is now."
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