The roots of the present economic crisis in India date back to November 8, 2016, when the terrible and thoughtless policy of demonetisation was carried out by the BJP Govt. That was followed by a badly executed Goods and Services Tax (GST) which further hurt the small scale sector and rural economy that had already been battered by demonetisation.
This left rural India and the unorganised sector in a precarious state and impoverished. Thousands of small-scale industries weavers, small scale artisans had to close down their businesses permanently, thanks to GST. In spite of this, people kept voting for the BJP in election after election – local, State, and national – with just a few exceptions. This was because of their unquestioning faith and hero worship of India’s PM Narendra Modi.
Of course, this unquestioning devotion (bhakti) by the majority of Indians is by no means new as Modi has mastered the art of narratives and mesmerised the spirit of nationalism which has polarised civil society.
As Ambedkar pointed out, Indians have a tendency to hero-worship. We made a Mahatma out of a mortal, Gandhi. When Nehru was alive, the level of bhakti for him surpassed by far even the levels of bhakti for Modi that are seen today, even though many have seen it convenient to only point out his flaws today.
It is well-known that Gandhi, in a last-ditch attempt to save the unity of India, offered the Prime Ministership of India to Jinnah. Nehru’s response to Gandhi was that he was willing to do that if Gandhi wanted it so; but would the people accept such a decision?
So we went from hero-worshipping Gandhi to hero-worshipping Nehru to even hero-worshipping Indira (no less a person than Vajpayee referred to Indira as “Durga” after the successful Bangladesh war of 1971) to, now, hero-worshipping Modi today.
And, for course, we will worship any other heroes who come along our way. We are, after all, a polytheistic society – we can accommodate multiple gods. So we hero-worship a Tendulkar, a Dhoni, a Kohli; a Rajesh Khanna, an Amitabh Bachchan, a Shah Rukh Khan; and so on. None of these “gods” deserve to be worshipped. They can be admired for their accomplishments but they also should be criticised for their shortcomings.
Unfortunately, as a society, this is our Achilles heel – that when we are caught up in the madness of our hero-worship, we cannot see any faults in our gods. It is only decades later, when the heroes have fallen from their pedestals, that we discover their flaws. By then, it is too late. What made this possible was the hero worship towards Nehru by the grandfathers and grandmothers of the same people who are cursing Nehru today night and day.
So don’t make the same mistakes that your forefathers did. Stop your hero-worship of Modi today, and start looking at everything from an objective and factual basis. Let us hope they document the economic ruin and not the utter destruction of India. That they should do the former and not the latter is entirely in the hands of the people of India.
