Why Modi Wins Elections

NOT MUCH MYSTERY in the mystery question, unless your address during the last decade has been a blind alley in the Anglosphere zone of Delhi. Why does Prime Minister Narendra Modi win elections? The nub of this electoral phenomenon is the rise of electoral consciousness among underprivileged women: in the Modi decade this has accelerated from arithmetical to geometrical progression through economic empowerment and social reform. The poor, across most traditional denominations, have found their leader, and women have discovered deliverance.

In our traditional equation, men earn the money and women provide the food. Women are the guards and guardians of the family. They convert the combined earning of a family into the essentials for survival and perhaps the occasional touch of comfort, or festive joy. This is changing but has not yet changed. The periodic agitation by women in many states for prohibition is based on the fear that too much of a man’s earnings will be wasted on alcohol before it reaches home. The woman’s earnings are always safe, for women by nature think of family before themselves.

Prime Minister Modi sealed a deal with women that began with sanitation, Jan Dhan banking, kitchen-cylinders, MUDRA bank loans, and with the Garib Kalyan food security programme begun during Covid. Five kilograms of rice or wheat, and one kilogram of dal came free to every home. Every single family in need received it. No one checked the name on the door. Caste and creed were irrelevant. The free food fed 800 million Indians at a time of existential insecurity and has now been extended to 2028. It is the largest welfare scheme in history. In one decision, Modi eliminated the greatest fear of the marginalised woman. Why would women abandon the leader who had become an annadata?

Food, light, roof, gas, water, sanitation, health, education.

Not a single home left out because of sectarian identity. It did not

matter whether you voted for Modi or not; the food arrived.

Women are the nodal “caste” in Prime Minister Modi’s radical recharacterisation of varna. “All women have one caste,” he has said in a public speech and urged women to protect their unity to enhance their interests. His four castes are the poor, young, women, and farmers. Poverty must be eliminated from lived experience; the young are the future; women are the guardians; and farmers feed a nation. He has defined modern governance for Indians and added a complementary challenge to casteism and communalism. Identity is defined by economics, not birth or religion.

Why do women vote for Modi? It’s a no-brainer.

ONE GREAT JOY of life is to open a new book. One does not buy a book in the belief that it is bad, and yet it is a joy to find out that it is good. Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King can be judged by both cover and content; both are excellent. Patrick Olivelle, born and raised in Sri Lanka and now professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, has the enviable talent of keeping the language simple and the content profound. A sprinkle from the jeroboam of research, suitable for a diary, from the world of Buddha, Ashoka, Andhras, Cholas, Gandhara, Kalinga, Kamboja, Pandyas, Pitinikas and Tamraparni, the ancient name of Sri Lanka.

I am not an advocate for mending something that has not—yet—been broken. But why not add some poetry to bureaucracy? The British left us with a steel structure which still holds, but left us with titles choked with paradox; where a director was lower than a secretary, and secretaries were over, under, and additionally cooked. Ashoka’s huge empire was managed by a government of four broad rungs: a Mahamantra at the top, with responsibility for a department or as governor; the Yukta; Rajuka; and Pradesika.

I suppose it would be too brave to revive the beautiful term Jambudvipa, or land of the rose apple, for the Indian subcontinent. But it could work at the conference level. It should not be difficult to find a think-tank ready to host a Jambudvipa conference on regional food and strategic security. The trouble of course is finding the money.

But back to Patrick Olivelle and the big dark blot of Chakravartin Ashoka’s memory: the conquest and destruction of Kalinga, roughly equivalent to modern Odisha. The unnamed ruler of Kalinga did not want to submit to any overlord. He had the resources which were sought by ambitious kings: Kautilya mentions in Arthashastra that its war elephants, the tanks of the old army, were the best in the land. Kalinga was coveted for its control of land and sea trade routes; its ports sent goods to Southeast Asia. If you wanted a Mauryan empire large enough for textbooks 2,500 years later, you had to conquer Kalinga, which Ashoka did after the rains of 260 BCE. The price of victory was fields of corpses; at least 100,000 of the enemy died and many times that number were deported.

So nothing’s changed then.

In Rock Edict XIII Ashoka apologises for the suffering he has caused. So one thing has changed. A conqueror said he was sorry.

THE ONLY THING alarming about artificial intelligence (AI) is that so many of the younger generation find it alarming. A young colleague voiced the conviction that these robotic thingummies would discover a life of their own and inevitably wreak vengeance on their creators, killing everyone alive. Two objections. This is illogical, given that robots are driven by information and logic. Second: humans and cockroaches will survive anything.

If the next stage in evolution is indeed artificial intelligence, then the term is half-correct. It is artificial, but maybe not as intelligent as its creators claim and others fear. Accumulation is not knowledge, arithmetic is not mathematics. AI, as one recent report notes, cannot evaluate or innovate with the power and creativity of the human brain. AI is a product, not a creation. It is a machine, not new life. It is an algorithm, not a mind. Rumours of the destruction of humanity, as Mark Twain surely would have said, are vastly exaggerated.

HERE IS THE SORT of idle information which a lazy AI Robot would produce in a jiffy: Richard Burton, the on-off husband of Elizabeth Taylor, spent a manic £1,000 per hour on his wife between January 1962, when they first met on the sets of the historic flop Cleopatra, and 1976, when they divorced for the second time. That’s true, if not quite true love.

IN DELHI THE WEATHER changes suddenly. The transition is gentle in Goa. Now that the rains have drifted away, Goa is back to three seasons in a day: early winter at dawn, early summer at noon, and early spring at night. That should stop you wondering about why the price of air tickets to Goa has soared beyond belief.

About The Author

MJ Akbar

MJ Akbar is the author of, among several titles, Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan. His latest book is Gandhi: A Life in Three Campaigns

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