Banyan: The enablers

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

NOT since Indira Gandhi has a prime minister of India been as dominant as Narendra Modi. His clout comes from the big electoral victory in May of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after a remarkably personalised campaign; from a hyperactive prime minister’s office that makes Mr Modi look presidential; and from an opposition Congress party in tatters. But even the mightiest cannot rule alone, and Mr Modi relies on two old allies, both crucial. One, Amit Shah, engineers the electoral victories that give Mr Modi his authority. The other, Arun Jaitley, must take that authority and out of it craft policies and decisions that will launch the economic recovery which Mr Modi has promised and by which he will be judged. These two men are Mr Modi’s enablers.

Now the BJP’s president, Mr Shah is a master of the dark political arts—indeed, his hooded eyes give him the air of a pantomime villain. He has served Mr Modi for nearly three decades. The pair collaborated in the state of Gujarat, where Mr Modi won three elections and ruled for a dozen years. Mr Shah had charge of ten state ministries, including home affairs.

Long an outsider in the urbane circles of Delhi’s national-level politics, Mr Shah is uncomfortable in English and rarely gives interviews. When he makes an exception, as he did after state-assembly elections this month in which the BJP seized control of Maharashtra and Haryana, he mostly uses the time to extol his boss. Of himself, he says merely: “Sometimes you get more credit than you deserve.” Mr Shah is too modest. He ran both state campaigns, just as he crafted the BJP general-election success in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh (UP). That victory was at the heart of Mr Modi’s national triumph in May.

Mr Modi stirs voters, but the alchemy of Mr Shah, who turned 50 this week, is to convert popularity into power. In UP the BJP’s share of the vote was 42%, compared with Congress’s 7.5%. That translated into 71 out of 80 of the national seats from the vast state, a golden return. Imbalances between vote share and seats are normal in first-past-the-post electoral systems, but achieving victory in India takes more skill and stamina elsewhere. Mr Shah makes minute analyses of millions-strong constituencies, imposing candidates and recruiting volunteers early, often from the Hindu-nationalist RSS organisation, where he and Mr Modi were once leaders. He tailors messages according to the audience. He has, variously, presented Mr Modi as a bringer of good economic times, a Hindu strongman and a figure of humble caste. Mr Shah has turned Hindus against Muslims (notoriously, he told Hindu Jats in UP to take electoral “revenge” following communal riots in late 2013). But he has also taken advantage of Shia Muslim antipathy towards Sunnis (in Lucknow, UP’s capital). Mr Modi’s campaigning certainly helps. He led 38 rallies in the recent state elections. Congress’s Rahul Gandhi showed up for only ten.

For all Mr Shah’s deftness, he also has a reputation as a bruiser. In 2010 he was charged over the kidnapping and murder by police (whom he oversaw) of a suspected extortionist, the man’s wife and a witness; he was also banned from Gujarat. The case remains in court. Another case, recently dropped though many details were uncontested, suggested that Mr Shah once ordered state employees to tail a female acquaintance of Mr Modi’s. Mr Shah is fiercely driven to serve his boss; it is unclear whether he cares for much else.

As for governing, Mr Modi now relies on a man who is as at ease at Delhi dinner parties as Mr Shah is uncomfortable. An urbane lawyer, Mr Jaitley holds a remarkable three cabinet posts—minister of finance, of defence and of corporate affairs. One MP recalls how in 2001 Mr Jaitley, a minister then, mentored Mr Modi, taking him to meet the capital’s power-brokers. Now Mr Modi is his boss, but as a newcomer to parliament—Mr Modi entered it for the first time in May—it helps that Mr Jaitley is a 14-year veteran of the upper house. The 61-year-old is also the prime minister’s best connection to the Delhi elite, chatting easily with politicians of all stripes and enjoying the cut-and-thrust of debate with newspaper editors. Unlike Mr Shah he lacks any electoral touch, failing even to get elected in Amritsar in May despite the BJP’s general landslide.

This month Mr Jaitley left hospital many kilos lighter following complications from an operation. He needs to be robust since no one in government, Mr Modi aside, has so many duties. As defence minister he bears some responsibility for India’s most aggressive posture in years towards Pakistan: exchanges of fire across the line of control in Kashmir have killed 19 people this month, a nasty escalation. But his biggest tasks are to overhaul India’s dysfunctional bureaucracy and to liberalise its economy. A few improvements are showing at last. Mr Jaitley is behind a flurry of initiatives in the past few days, including the appointment of a liberal chief economic adviser, Arvind Subramanian, tweaks to rules to make labour inspectors less despotic, moves to let the market set the price of diesel, and a push to overhaul subsidies for cooking gas that are the object of rampant abuse.

That is all welcome, but deeper changes are needed, certainly by March when Mr Jaitley delivers his first full budget. He says a priority is for parliament to amend the constitution to pass a national tax on goods and services that can raise revenues and foster a single market in a country riven by local protectionism. He also needs to rethink a muddled stance on liberalising global trade, make it easier for businesses to buy land and open up for more private investors.

For India, the grinding business of governing will count for far more than the showmanship on the campaign trail that Mr Modi evidently loves (this week he flitted to Kashmir, ahead of a state election there). And in the end, Mr Modi will be judged not by the accomplishments of the panto villain, but by the changes represented by his other enabler, the urbane Mr Jaitley. No point gathering political capital if you do not use it.

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