By Parvez Alam,
This is in response to the article published on 21 April 2014 in The Hindu by David B. Cohen titled, “Is India about to elect its Reagan?” Let me start with the biases of David B. Cohen first. He is ‘a great admirer of President Reagan’ and also ‘a great admirer of India’. As an American he is not ‘looking down on India’ and he is also ‘pro-India American’. To my mind his prejudices can mislead Indian voters as well as political analysts of India and US who don’t have time to turn over the pages of history about Reagan’s era.
Creating consensus by biases:
Yes, Reagan and Modi (hereafter R-M) had humble origin but this doesn’t signify that R-M behaved humbly or with more political power and authority they showed any desire to do so. David Cohen seems to forget the context of Reagan’s rise as President of the USA. Though Jimmy Carter is not considered as strong as what Reagan represented during Afghanistan war or giving impetus to the new cold war but credit do goes to Carter administration that negotiated constructively with Islamic world. After ‘weak’ President and leadership crisis, Reagan, opposed by the ‘cultural elite’, arose as the 40th President of the USA.
Narendra Modi [TCN file photo]
I am sure that David Cohen might have limited space to write a piece in support of strong candidature to woo the Indian Diaspora based in the US but also wooing the Indian voters by creating the binary of ‘cultural elite,’ on one hand, and ‘R-M with humble origin’ on the other. By omitting certain facts he might have succeeded in making a soft corner for Modi in the minds of Americans but it’s hard to deviate, by convincing, the firm-minded educated class in India who is aware about all the mischief Reagan did and why Americans are searching Reagan in Modi.
Modinomics is not Reaganomics:
As Reagan had the responsibility to capture the world market by reviving ‘dollar hegemony’, ‘restoring the U.S. Dollar to a gold standard’ and ‘warmongering foreign policy’, the protectionism for the United States and ‘open up’ economy for the rest of the world was the prescription of the Reaganomics. Here Modinomics is understood as open up market, more and more FDI, privatization, taxing rich minimally and no care for deprived sections of the society.
In other words, rich will take care of their own human development alone and poor will take care of themselves on their own (as they have always done earlier), means there remains less scope for the government, and governance is taken-for-granted as individuals (the rich) govern themselves better than the State. Modinomics is also about favoritism to certain sections of society and that section (media and corporate nexus) is currently favoring Modi, the saviour.
Nature of detractors, Kleptocratic crony socialism:
It was wrong from the Democrats’ (cultural elites) side that they used the filthy terms like racist for Reagan, but Cohen should understand that in India, it is not the opponents who use the term “communalist or communal”, by and large, but it is also accepted and used by the RSS and BJP ideologues. So ‘communalist’ for them doesn’t sound as filthy as ‘racist’ does in the United States.
Interestingly, Cohen doesn’t have much to offer on how Modi is similar to Reagan. It seems that he is presuming that all cultural elites in India are opposed to Modi assuming that BJP doesn’t have cultural elite. RSS, the organization in which Modi worked as swaymsevak, and groomed himself as leader, is an organization of cultural elite, by and large. Ironically, Modi is representing unknowingly the voice of those political and cultural elites who dictate its terms as civil society to the political organization. I wonder if cultural elites within Republicans were also opposed to Reagan then how Reagan could become President for two terms!
Reagan vs. Soviet Union and Modi vs. Pakistan:
I grinned while reading on the issue of Pakistan and comparison with Reagan’s stance on Soviet Union. Many in India have failed to understand, and I am not saying that I am the one who has fully understood the complex relations with Pakistan. But deriving from the history of political relations with Pakistan under BJP’s regime, it is pertinent to understand that it was not the BJP leadership who wanted souring relationship with Pakistan but it was the latter’s leadership giving life to the genie called ‘ideological state’. Had it not been Cold War time, Reagan would have behaved more co-operatively with Soviet Union as Obama is doing with its successor state, Russia (excluding Ukrainian crisis and stance on Syria).
Cohen seems to create the binary of Islamic extremist and the rest, adding more to the Huntingtonian thesis of ‘clash of civilizations’. He has prejudices, firstly, as he had served the Bush Jr. administration and so he is affected by the disease called Islamophobia. The explanation is as simple as that of Modi’s ruling the state in which Muslims were butchered and killed.
As for Americans (not all) Truman (for using Fat Man and Little Boy against Japan), Kennedy (for escalating Vietnam War), Eisenhower (for Korean Crisis), Nixon (for furthering Vietnam War), Reagan (for Reaganomics), Bush Jr. (For everything overseas), should not be prosecuted under the international law because they were not directly involved on the ground. It was the soldiers who carried out the missions of their respective administrations and hence they (soldiers) should be prosecuted and hanged and not the bosses.
Eichmann in Jerusalem:
So even if Supreme Court has given the apparent ‘clean chit’ to Modi, in the eyes of Arendt (and many others), he is still a mass murderer. So it would be something like this; according to Cohen, Hitler is not at all responsible and hence is not guilty of any act of Genocide. Hannah Arendt had written about ‘banality of evil’ stressing how laymen and commoners are absorbed into the act of killing and they also justify how they carried out the mission of their godman or political echelon for some just cause. Well, it is like Eichmann (Babu Bajrangi, Maya Kodnani) was more responsible for killing and gassing Jews in Germany because he was just following Hitler’s messages and missions for ‘final solutions’ (Endlosung) for the ‘Jewish problem’. Modi, of course, is not the layman or common man; he is the Reagan of India and David Cohen is pro-India American.
(Parvez Alam is a Research Scholar at Academy of International Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.)