Scholarship deficiency

Shades of Saffron: from Vajpayee to Modi, Saba Naqvi, Westland Publications; Rs.599, Pages 288 One of the main challenges institutions of Indian democracy are facing is decline of the liberal professions. Journalists, lawyers, professors were supposed to be the front line of the army fighting for the rights of the governed. Today, they are seen more as collaborators of the governors. Why that is so is the subject matter of a separate debate. However, one reason is certainly worth exploring. The powerful and influential sections of these professions seem to be divorced from serious pursuit of scholarship without which these professions can only produce technicians who, at their best, will be useful tools for their employers but will have nothing to contribute to our collective life. Senior journalist Saba Naqvi’s latest book traces the journey of the BJP governments and politics from the Vajpayee era to Modi. The initial chapters of the book are set in the late 1990s and deal with personalities and events which have been important milestones in the emergence of the BJP as the pre-eminent pan-India political party. Saba writes with sufficient sympathy about several BJP leaders with whom she is ideologically not in sync, like Vajpayee, Advani, Govindacharya, except Modi. She is an engaging storyteller. Written in a conversational, journalistic style with inevitable doses of power gossip, the book reads like a story and is fairly informative. But it remains a fact-based journalistic work and doesn’t attempt any deep or long-term political, historical analysis of the tectonic movements of Indian politics in the past couple of decades. Regrettably, Shades of Saffron is not a work of history and lacks serious political analysis. It tells us that Vajpayee and Modi represent different shades of saffron. A serious reader would be interested in learning why. Why did the RSS which was supposed to wield the remote control, become subservient to the Nehruvian regime of Vajpayee and even more to the dominant regime of Modi? How did a fairly federal democratic BJP become a one man show after just one election? How did BJP dominate the 2014 parliamentary elections after doing nothing as the main opposition party between 2004-2014 while scoring one self-goal after another? What did the integral humanism of Deendayal Upadhyaya mean for Indian politics and how much of it was manifested in the BJP governments of Vajpayee and/or Modi? These questions are not seriously answered. It does not ask why the Nehru parivar has shrunk and the sangh parivar has ballooned in the last two decades even though both have had ten years of power at the Centre. It is perhaps the nature of Indian political journalism which produces such unsatisfactory narratives. Journalists like Naqvi get used to khabar journalism in which a lot of importance is accorded to gossip, palace intrigue etc, which make readable sensational copy for a weekly or daily, but is trivia for individuals with deeper interest in politics and examining the long-term movements of political forces. The enjoyment our political journalists…