Ramachandra Guha: Seven duopolies that shaped independent India (and which have been most damaging) |
On August 6, 2019, I was having coffee with a group of colleagues at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. We were discussing the abrogation, the previous day, of Article 370 in Kashmir. One of the younger members at the table, a computer scientist, remarked: “What we have now is not Modi 2.0, but Shah 1.0.” It was, of course, the new home minister who had planned and piloted the downgrading of India’s only Muslim-majority state.
Perhaps to see this as “Shah 1.0” was an exaggeration, but now there was little question that Amit Shah was not just the second-most powerful man in government but the only minister with any real authority and independence of action apart from the prime minister himself.
The Modi-Shah jugalbandi has had its precedents. Consider the partnership, in government, between Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel in the early years of independent India. While the poisonous polemics of contemporary politics represents them as rivals and adversaries, in truth they were friends, colleagues, and co-workers. Amidst the ruins of Partition, faced with the challenges of scarcity and privation, conflict and division, a united and democratic India might never have come into being had Nehru and Patel not worked together.
Patel played the leading role in uniting India territorially, by bringing the princely states on board, modernising the administrative system, taming the violent extremists of the Hindu Right and a communist Left, and getting a recalcitrant Congress to support the process of Constitution-making being directed by BR Ambedkar.
At the same time, Nehru played the leading role in uniting India emotionally, by assuring equal rights to religious and linguistic minorities and to women, and by energetically advocating universal adult franchise in the face of bitter elite opposition to it.
To be sure, Nehru and Patel had their differences, yet they worked heroically to submerge them in the larger national interest. It is also true that they had the support of remarkably able ministers like Ambedkar and of competent civil servants. Nonetheless, historical scholarship has authoritatively demonstrated the central, indeed defining, role their partnership played in forging a nation from........