Dr. Praveen Patil is the Founder & CEO of 5Forty3 Datalabs. His Twitter profile describes him as a “story teller who weaves tales through numbers and a demographic scientist who has indigenously built many data-tech platforms.” In the two tweeted videos appended here, he gives us his observations on the recently concluded Chhatisgarh Assembly elections. In the second video he talks about the impact these observations are likely to have on the coming elections in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, leading up to the General Elections in 2019.
It was Abraham Lincoln, who in 1862 wrote, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so must we think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” India too has been held in thrall by the subaltern elites who have not been able to throw off the yoke of intellectual slavery to their erstwhile colonial masters. Narendra Modi, born after independence, and unencumbered by Macaulayist conditioning, is discarding the dogmas of the “unquiet” past and acting anew. He is addressing the very constituency that had been marginalised by the colonialists and getting a refreshing response. He has thrown the entrenched power centres into disarray while sweeping away the accumulated dust of the decades of neglect.
Modi has all along suffered the hostility of the elitist media and he has found his own ways of dealing with it. That is why he refuses to indulge them with studio interviews and press conferences. He finds it much easier to be in direct touch with the people. He is a great communicator, especially when speaking extempore, touching upon issues that are closest to the hearts of his audience. Mann ki Baat, in which he directly speaks on radio, has completely cut the middlemen out of the communication chain, while his reach has expanded to almost 90% of the Indian people.
He also knows that his constituency is not any particular vote bank to which he needs to pander. His has been an inclusive campaign, notwithstanding his overt Hindu civilisational upbringing; and from the time he was chosen as the BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate, he has been speaking for all Indians. The impact of the fact that the BJP got elected with a majority on its own despite having practically no presence in the South (except Karnataka) and in the East, is lost on those who still keep talking about only 31% having voted for the party. Take the South and the East out of the equation and the numbers will change dramatically.
Locked in their historical prejudice, wilful ignorance, a paucity of common sense, and a disastrous degree of intellectual arrogance, these elites have not realised that the future of India can only be secured with a robust and dynamic foreign policy.
There are also a number of people, ostensibly supporters of the BJP, but who have displayed impatience with the slow pace at which their pet peeves have been addressed. Among these is the seeming inability of the Modi government to bring the Gandhi family to book on its various economic offences. The National Herald case has been dragging on, and even though the mother-son duo is out on bail, the case does not appear to be closing any time soon. Similarly, the son-in-law is still at large though there is enough evidence to book him on many counts. The Chidambaram family has been cocking-a-snook at the Government and daring it to bring them to heel. The failed experiment of a joint BJP-PDP government in Jammu & Kashmir, is another stick with which some supporters have been beating Modi and Amit Shah. Mercifully, the Governor has been advised to dissolve the assembly just in time to thwart the shenanigans of the National Conference, PDP, and the Congress to cobble together an unholy alliance and pitch the state directly into complete instability.
The failure to build a temple at Ayodhya despite a landslide victory in the UP assembly elections has also dismayed many BJP supporters. Similarly, the antics of a known anti-national Trupti Desai who defied tradition and entered the Shani Shingnapur temple in Maharashtra, followed by the current chaos at Sabarimala is wearing some people’s patience quite thin. Social media is full of chatter by people who are threatening to either press NOTA or abstain from voting in the 2019 General Elections. They do not realise that NOTA or abstention both are not going to make it easier for Modi to do what they would like. Instead it will weaken his hands and send him into his second term with shackles.
This is exactly what the Congress and the opposition want. Their grubby hands have been kept away from the till for the last 4-1/2 years, and their illegal islands of currency were hit by the Demonetisation tsunami. The world too is watching how strong Modi will be in 2019. With a hostile and nuclear-armed Pakistan, seemingly on the verge of collapse, and a rampaging Islamic militancy engulfing the Arab world, India’s highest priority is to safeguard the country from an enemy who is driven not by expansionist desire but by religious dogma. Narendra Modi has understood the grim reality of the threat, and hence has lost no time in building coalitions that can thwart the ambitions of the marauding hordes.
The UPA had left the armed forces precariously short of fighting materials. It is only now we understand how desperately disarmed we had become under Manmohan Singh. Modi has wasted no time in replenishing the armouries while eliminating wasteful middlemen from the deals. This elimination has hurt the Congress the most. The party has become so obsessed with the Rafale deal that its entire election campaign has been built upon this one non-issue. The bankruptcy of the Congress think tank become obvious when it aligns itself with a known anarchist like Prashant Bhushan and uses disgruntled former BJP Ministers, Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie, to lend credence to its campaign. As Dr. Patil says in the video, not even 0.6% of the voters in Chhatisgarh were even aware of the Rafale deal. He further states that he is reasonably sure that this percentage will not be any significantly higher in the rest of the country.
If Modi has appeared to be a tad slow in addressing the domestic problems of better governance and less corruption, it is because he feels that the foreign threats are more imminent which will have longer-lasting consequences. Foreign policy, therefore, had to be put in the fast lane, and ahead of any other concern. Modi’s foreign policy initiatives, beginning with the invitation to the heads of the SAARC nations to attend his swearing-in ceremony, and followed quickly by visits to Bhutan, Nepal and Japan, are based in realpolitik, meant to build an atmosphere of trust and co-operation with India’s immediate neighbourhood. The Chinese President too was, rather pointedly, received not in New Delhi, but in Mahatma Gandhi’s city, thereby stressing India’s commitment to non-violence. The informal setting of the Sabarmati Ashram where the two leaders met could not but create an atmosphere of cordiality and an absence of hostility. While the pundits debated why the Chinese decided to make a rather deep incursion into Ladakh at the same time, they forgot to notice India’s firm and strong response to the Chinese show of belligerence. The Australian Prime Minister’s visit too assured his country’s co-operation on a number of issues, including the supply of uranium required for nuclear power plants.
The PM’s first official visit to the U.S. was analyzed threadbare, and apart from a few choleric malcontents like Mani Shankar Aiyar and news traders of the Rajdeep Sardesai and Barkha Dutt variety, the general consensus was that in his interactions with the Indian diaspora, the UN General Assembly, the captains of American industry and commerce, and above all, with the U.S. President, the Prime Minister had more than exceeded the expectations of the people at home. Nawaz Sharif’s whining at the UNGA did not even merit a response from Modi, who completely ignored him at the summit. The Pakistani press also found it difficult to fault Modi on his approach and found nothing praiseworthy in their own PM’s speech and delivery.
Half a millennium ago the Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli had said that a nation could not use patience and goodness to subdue enemies; it must exact vengeance through punitive actions that annihilate present enemies and make their successors think twice before pursuing attacks that risk the same response. The period between 1972 and 2014 demonstrated how damaging a doctrine of pacific response has been to Indian interests. We have seen how both Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh fretted about what the world would think if military power was used against the many acts of war committed against India by Pakistan. The attack on the Parliament, the Kandahar hijacking, the Kargil War, and above all 26/11, all were provocations of the extreme kind, but every time our response amounted to nothing more than sabre rattling. Pakistan’s destabilisation of the valley of Kashmir is already half-a-century old, but our response has been pusillanimous. Instead of visiting retribution on the perpetrators and instigators from across the border, our forces have been ranged against our own citizens creating disaffection and fuelling the fires of armed insurrections.
The threat posed to the very existence of India by this lethal combination of Arab-style nationalism and religion is very real and imminent. That we cannot expect any help from Western Europe becomes obvious when one looks at the demographic time bomb that is ticking relentlessly across that continent. Mark Steyn, who with Niall Ferguson has studied this subject writes, ”Europe, like Japan has catastrophic birth rates and a swollen pampered elderly class determined to live in defiance of economic reality. But the difference is that on the Continent the successor (Muslim) population is already in place and the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be.” Today Europe is confronted with a shrinking and ageing population that will require an ever-increasing flow of immigrants to maintain a workforce to keep its social welfare system from bankruptcy for a bit longer. “Where will the new labor come from?” asks Mark Steyn. “A talented ambitious Chinese or Indian has zero reasons to immigrate to France, unless he is consumed by a perverse fantasy of living in a segregated society that artificially constrains his economic opportunities yet imposes confiscatory taxation on him in order to support an ancient regime of indolent geriatrics.”
The young workers will come from the high birth rates of the already in place Muslim citizens as also from fresh immigrants from the Islamic world, especially North Africa. “The EC’s decades long effort to legislate multiculturalism comes from the illusive belief that if poor, illiterate, unhealthy Muslims are given Western style education, better health care, proper drinking water and voting booths, they will abandon their faith, love Israel, and encourage their daughters to give up ‘purdah’ and be more feminist. They forget that Islam becomes more, not less important to the inhabitants of an invaded Muslim country, and while improvements in living conditions are appreciated, they are not religiously transforming.” The CIA veteran Michael Scheuer writes in his book “Marching Towards Hell” that “in Guantanamo Bay, for example, we are building a truly dedicated and virulently anti-US mujahedin battalion, the members of which will have the best cared for teeth in the Islamic world.”
India, therefore, will have to face the Islamic threat emanating from Pakistan, abetted by the global Jihadi infrastructure, without expecting any help from the Western democracies. China, at best, may choose not to militarily support Pakistan, but is unlikely to put any hurdles in its way. “Kadi ninda” and “proportional response” are, therefore, synonyms for ineffective action designed to please international opinion, antinational organisations, and the votaries of dialogue. The hydra-headed institutions of anti-national NGOs, human rights organisations, disarmament groups, environmental organisations, climbing on the shoulders of a discredited, corrupt and effete Congress party are presenting an obstacle that limit in every possible way the ability of the Indian security establishment to capture and kill the enemy in sufficient numbers to give a chance of victory.
Truculent, sensationalist, and media-abetted campaigns by these organisations are in full swing to halt anti-Indian rendition programs, agitate against nuclear sites, maintain rules of engagement that make Indian soldiers targets, not killers, and allege human rights crimes against as many Indian military personnel as possible. Hafiz Saeed and his Sunni militant allies come from an Islamic civilisation in which force remains a lingua franca, an environment in which the weak are destroyed. Till now India possessed no deterrent in the minds of Hafiz Saeed and his allies, and it is time to seek to reestablish one. Narendra Modi has made it his priority to remove this perception from the minds of India’s enemies and make them think many times before they plan any large-scale acts of violence against the Indian people.
One of the founding fathers of the United States of America, and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay, wrote in 1785: “I consider knowledge to be the soul of the republic, and as the weak and the wicked are generally, in alliance, as much care should be taken to diminish the number of the former as of the latter.” The period of 2004 to 2014 has been an alliance of the weak Manmohan Singh and the wicked UPA, and now that their numbers are being significantly diminished, it is the duty of the Narendra Modi government to put India first on its list of priorities and ensure that the country’s foreign policy is framed to put the safety of the people above all other considerations. Only in an environment of safety can economic prosperity and development be guaranteed.
Coming back to Dr. Patil’s observations, the ordinary citizens of India appear to have understood this fact very well. December 11, 2018 will determine how accurate his reading of the signs has been.
