Message from Istanbul: How not to challenge ModiPremium Story
The Indian Express | 1 day ago | 08-06-2023 | 12:45 pm
The Indian Express
1 day ago | 08-06-2023 | 12:45 pm
No leader resembles Narendra Modi more than Recep Tayyip Erdogan who has just been re-elected for another five-year term as Turkey’s president. Both leaders are virtually doppelgangers in terms of their political roots, paths to power, ideological orientation, pet policies, and impact on their countries. What can the trajectory of Turkey’s most influential politician since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk tell us about Prime Minister Modi who aspires to at least a similar standing in India vis-a-vis Jawaharlal Nehru?Both Erdogan and Modi hail from humble backgrounds, well outside their country’s privileged elites. Both made their name as rulers of important regions — Erdogan as mayor of Istanbul, Modi as Chief Minister of Gujarat. Both came to lead their countries off the back of waves of popular disaffection with secular, left-leaning governments that had become mired in corruption. Both are polarising figures whose core base consists of tradition-minded, conservative voters in their countries’ heartlands. Both are one-man shows, who tower over their parties and governments and have ruthlessly centralised power and patronage of a select circle of businessmen. Both are self-styled strongmen who take pride in wielding muscular foreign policies and crow about having raised their countries’ global stature. Both have deployed a potent cocktail of religion, nationalism, welfare, and economic development to retain their grip on power while reshaping their countries to increasingly resemble majoritarian autocracies.The recently concluded presidential polls in Turkey were billed as the best chance to displace Erdogan since he first came to power in 2003, with the country under the grip of an acute cost of living crisis and the Opposition at its most organised in years. But despite pre-election polls pointing to Erdogan’s political demise, he managed to eventually comfortably beat his rival, extending his rule into an unprecedented third decade exactly 100 years after the Turkish republic was founded by Ataturk.Four observations from Turkey may be relevant for India’s political future. First, elected autocrats are difficult to vote out of office. The legitimacy gained from winning elections gives them freer rein to tilt the electoral playing field in their favour than if they were unelected rulers. Erdogan, like Modi, has relentlessly deployed not just the advantages of incumbency — showering largesse in the run-up to the vote, including free gas, discounted electricity, and broadband packages for students, and boosting the minimum wage and civil servant pay — but the full authoritarian playbook to gain every advantage at the polls. He has undermined institutional checks on his power — be it courts or election authorities — stifled the political Opposition, deployed government agencies to harass and even imprison critics, and restricted media freedom via laws, law suits, and police action. Just as in India, most private TV news channels are controlled by business groups beholden to Erdogan. The Turkish president — like PM Modi — is given wall-to-wall coverage by a fawning media, and his government’s claims are seldom critically evaluated. Meanwhile, Erdogan’s party, like the BJP, deploys aggressive propaganda on social media and manipulates public opinion via messaging platforms such as WhatsApp.Second, despite the serious erosion of democratic rights and constitutional values under authoritarian leaders, it is hard to galvanise voters over these issues. The rule of law, freedom of expression, independence of the courts, and abuse of government agencies all appear as distant and somewhat abstract concerns to the wider populace. Only an egregious violation of individual rights, as happened with forced sterilisation during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, can stir widespread outrage. Turkey’s united Opposition managed to compose a joint platform that pledged new laws increasing freedom of expression and individual rights, greater independence for the courts, and generally to reverse Erdogan’s consolidation of power, but these promises do not appear to have made much difference to their campaign.By contrast, and this is the third observation, the core nationalist and religious-minded supporters nurtured by Erdogan and Modi remain a potent force at the ballot box. Islamist voters in Turkey’s Anatolian heartland feel an emotional bond with Erdogan for allowing pious women to wear the headscarf in public offices (banned by Ataturk), restricting alcohol sales, and for endorsing Islamic values and practices previously sidelined by secular governments in Turkey. This appears to also be true of Modi’s Hindutva constituency for whom his delivery on issues such as the Ram temple in Ayodhya and playing up the overly Hindu character of the state (such as the prominence of Hindu rituals in the inauguration of the new Indian Parliament) at the expense of supposedly “foreign” (Muslim and British) elements underpins their continued loyalty.Finally, displacing an autocrat requires the Opposition to weave a powerful counter-narrative centred on the bread-and-butter realities of the average voter — and not on the hoary ideals of the constitution or bleeding heart laments against bigotry and pleas for unity. Turkey’s Opposition was simply not able to convince a majority of the electorate that they could govern better than Erdogan. Even in areas of the country that were badly affected by the government’s botched response to the devastating earthquake in February (which killed over 50,000), voters appear to have given Erdogan the benefit of the doubt. Corruption allegations wash over Erdogan who, like Modi, carefully projects a relatively austere image while tightly channeling his party’s funding and favours. And as for the crisis-ridden economy, the Opposition’s technically-oriented focus on strengthening the independence of the central bank and reversing Erdogan’s unorthodox interest rate policies (which have resulted in 50+ per cent annual inflation and a sharp drop in the value of the lira) failed to catch fire beyond urban centres.This last observation is particularly relevant for India’s Opposition. Even as the world apparently can’t stop cheering India’s prospects, the black hole at the heart of Modi’s economic record is around job creation. Despite headline GDP growth figures, India is simply failing to create even a fraction of the jobs required by its burgeoning youth population. The violent protests last year over the introduction of the Agnipath scheme and Railway recruitment were a stark illustration of the frustration. This despair over jobs presents perhaps the only opening for a credible anti-Modi election strategy. A 2020 report by the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that at least 90 million new non-farm jobs are needed by 2030 just to keep pace with India’s youth bulge. Unless India’s Opposition can unite behind a compelling programme to deliver these, they face an uphill battle to dislodge the BJP in next year’s Lok Sabha elections.The writer is a private equity investor based in London
