Time for course correction
After Mr Modi’s discomfiture over the comments on Islam’s Prophet by his party’s spokespersons, it is the turn of a possible future PM, Yogi Adityanath, to face a similar dilemma! Yogi had publicly sworn to demolish the houses of those who destroy public property! In furtherance of his threat, his minions have punished only Muslims till now.
Hordes of unemployed youth went on the rampage in UP. Is Yogi going to order demolitions in their cases also?
Recently, hordes of unemployed youth who abound in his state of Uttar Pradesh went on the rampage destroying public property, mainly train coaches parked in railway “sidings” and also public buses on city streets! Is Yogi going to order similar demolitions in their cases also? Most of these young men come from poor families who have been the beneficiaries of the PM’s Awas Yojana! Their houses were constructed or repaired in their villages from funds released by the Centre. It will be sheer tragedy for the government to destroy what it itself has built!
Now, most of these rioting youth must be hailing from the majority community. It will be difficult for the UP CM to pick only on Muslims from among the rioters. Most of them will be poor. There are poor among the forward castes also. For recruitment to the Army, certain castes like Jats, Rajputs and Yadavs have traditionally aspired. Even UP’s Brahmins are prominent at such recruitment drives. This will make Yogi’s obligation to take action against arsonists and other assorted offenders doubly difficult.
But he will be damned if he does just like he will be damned if he does not! A real Catch-22 situation! My friends feel I should not sympathise with megalomaniac leaders and let them “stew in their own poisonous juices”. That is one way of looking at it.
My erstwhile colleague, KPS Gill, once told my wife that I was not cut out for the police and certainly not for leading the police in Punjab. He opined that a person with a soft heart like mine could not deal with the Jat! I cannot sleep at night if a Modi or an Adityanath, presently riding on crests of waves, is left without some sage advice when they find themselves staring down the slopes of precipices. My advice to Yogi is to retrace his steps and rebuild at his government’s cost the houses he has demolished already. Yes, they are all of Muslim rioters and Muslims are his bête noire. But the alternative is to destroy the houses of Hindu rioters also and that will cost him dearly in future elections.
Unemployment is a major problem in today’s India. It cannot be solved by merely making tall promises that none is prepared to believe! That stage is gone. Covid and the Russian-Ukrainian war notwithstanding, the young expect the Sarkar to work miracles! The problem is that the Sarkar has fed them with dollops of propaganda to make them believe that it has been performing miracles at regular intervals! They have lapped it all up! So, when the crisis hits, all their expectations come to naught, causing them to riot! The solution — stop making tall claims and come down to earth. But that advice is for the future.
After the trauma of the farmers agitation that lasted a year or more and caused massive disruption of traffic coming in and out of Delhi, it was expected that Mr Modi would tinker with his penchant for the dramatic moment to announce new initiatives in governance. But it is apparent now that the yen for the dramatic will not leave our Great Leader! The Defence Minister, normally a balanced individual, announced the Agnipath scheme with great aplomb, forgetting that every month for the past eight months, youth aspiring to enlist under the old rules were told that they had to wait for a call — and they were waiting!
When they learnt that the old rules had been scrapped and the new Agnipath scheme involved only four years of soldiering minus the usual perks like pension, medical cover for life, etc., they went berserk! The government’s capitulation earlier to the One Rank, One Pension demand had put the defence budget askew. Instead of the already steep 18% share of pension payouts in the Budget, the figure rose to 26% which left a hole in the pocket for purchase of defence hardware.
Even more crucial was the urgent necessity to reduce manpower in the Army in order to modernise and make it lean and mean like the armies of other advanced nations which depend more on technology than on men. Even China went through this exercise a year or two ago but before discharging the surplus manpower, it embarked on elaborate motions of rehabilitating the discharged ones to avoid unrest. In India and China, we have surplus manpower unlike the US and Europe that welcome immigrants to meet shortages of men.
Our leaders should pay more attention to the feelings of people affected by their innovative reforms, however brilliant they may turn out to be. Instead, they are hung up on the image of the Great Leader and how much it will add to his stature in men’s eyes! In the hurry and their anxiety, they neglect to calculate the fall-out of their reforms on those who will be adversely affected by them. When will they learn? Earlier they do so the better because then they will have mollified the affected before the grand announcement. Of course, the announcement itself will have lost its sheen because the details would be known to the public at large, which is as it should be.
The real problem is unemployment of our burgeoning youth population. We as a nation have not planned wisely like China, for instance, has done. Manufacturing jobs have to be created to absorb the new entrants into the job market. Avenues for sale of the products also need to be found. If our “fringe elements” who have been fed on a steady diet of hate for the minority continue to talk absolute nonsense like it is doing now, even the few markets that we have in the Middle East will disappear.
Mr Modi will need to reinvent himself and his party. He can start by banning the bulldozers now freely used by Yogi Adityanath and other BJP Chief Ministers in their one-point hate agenda. The use of the bulldozer as it presently is, to collectively punish one particular community, is patently illegal. In any case, it is immoral and unethical. I am surprised that our judiciary has not come down more strongly against this illegality. It will lead this country — and Mr Modi — down the slippery slopes of destruction.
