Right now, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has the option to strengthen governance, really start to fix the country’s major economic problems, and reinforce our institutions 

The more you study India’s history the more you have to marvel at our infinite capacity to fight among ourselves. Ashoka, the last of the great Mauryan emperors, fought the savage Kalinga battle circa 260 BCE; the deaths of over 300,000 people and the savage bloodshed he witnessed filled him with remorse, and about two and a half years later he embraced the young Buddhist religion. 

Ashoka began to propagate his Views on dharma, good deeds and governance through his rock and pillar edicts. As one account puts it, “By dharma, as Ashoka repeatedly declared, he understood the energetic practice of the socio-moral virtues of honesty truthfulness, compassion, mercifulness, benevolence, non-violence, considerate behaviour towards all, ‘little sin and many good deeds, non-extravagance, non-acquisitiveness, and non-injury to animals. He spoke of no particular mode of religious creed or worship, nor of any philosophical doctrines.” 

It took more than 2,000 years after Ashoka’s death in 232 BCE for his edicts, which were inscribed in languages as varied as Kharoshti, Greek, Aramaic and Brahmi, to be deciphered, foremost around 1837 by the polymath English administrator James Prinsep whom I have written about before. In many of his edicts Ashoka signs off as Piyadassi, the beloved of the gods. 

After Kalinga, Ashoka focused on being a beloved, benign monarch, but Mauryan society was not happily homogeneous. Historian Romila Thapar quotes Megasthenes, the Seleucid ambassador, as recording seven castes based on occupation: philosophers (who were exempt from taxes), farmers, soldiers, herdsmen, artisans, magistrates and councillors. No subject was permitted to marry outside his or her caste. 

In free, democratic and modern India, we are now beholden to scholars like Braj Bihari Kumar an obscure anthropologist who was named earlier this month as the new chairman of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR). Kumar was quoted as writing in Dialogue, a journal he edited (I couldn’t access it on the internet), that caste and untouchability were the cause of slavery and forced conversions by India’s Muslim rulers. “A point, needing emphasis, is that caste in the present form, untouchability and intra-Hindu societal exploitation are entirely non-Hindu factors, “Kumar is quoted as writing.  

In actual fact, caste appears to have been present in India long before the first Muslim invaders ever reached the borders of what the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) describes as Akhand Bharat (Greater India), Some of the history I brushed upon recently was about how caste, class and religion have divided Indians into untenably small principalities, fiefdoms and mini-kingdoms, and bred both complacency and indifference to inimical forces. 

For instance, the Chach-nama, a Persian chronicle of the seventh and eighth centuries, describes the conquest of Sindh, and the defeat of the Hindu king Dahir by the Umayyad general Muhammad bin Qasim in 712CE. This was the eastern-most edge of the Arab empire that engulfed the Iberian peninsula, northern Africa, and onwards through present-day Afghanistan to Sindh. The Indian dynasties who controlled much of the peninsula then the Rashtrakutas, the Pratiharas and the Palas — were too busy fighting one another for control of the northern kingdom of Kannauj to pay heed to the mlechchas (unclean ones) as they referred derisively to the foreign invaders, who eventually consolidated their hold over their conquest. (Present-day Kannauj is represented in the Lok Sabha by Dimple Yadav the bahu of the once-mighty caste based ruling clan in Uttar Pradesh). 

 Kalinga is the historical name of Odisha. It is ruled by the Biju Janata Dal, long in power in the impoverished eastern state, and Narendra Modi has his eyes on that prize as he faces his own, democratic, battle there in 2019 state assembly elections, the same year he hopes to win a second term himself as prime minister. 

Before he gets there, however, as Modi surveys the landscape three years into his first term, the question most Indians will be asking is, what Big Things does he have in store for them? 

The biggest danger the unchallenged Modi faces is his own self. He could pull another rabbit out of his hat, like he did with demonetisation, but how much shock and awe can the populace take? You can be sure he is carefully weighing his next move, just as he did all those years as an RSS pracharak, travelling widely, working quietly, accumulating friends and connections, and listening very carefully all the while. 

There is not likely to be any threat from the fragmented opposition. One senior politician I spoke with said with the Congress party melting away like a Himalayan glacier, it is tempting to cite the TINA (there is no alternative) factor: But that was said of every strong leader since independence, “and an alternative power structure emerged by and by Nature abhors a vacuum”. 

Right now, Modi has the option to strengthen governance, really start to fix the country’s major economic problems, and reinforce our institutions . Sadly none of this seems likely: the next two years will see a number of state elections. It will be very easy to succumb to the temptations of populist event management. 

On governance, there is no sign of the Lokpal, and the ink-black world of political party finances has if anything become more impenetrable. On the economy, there is a depressing laundry list. Labour and Employment Minister Bandaru Dattatreya blithely promised 10 million jobs in the next two years (he said the same thing in January). Dattatreya’s ministry estimated, as of 2015, that 12.8 million Indians enter the labour force each year Meanwhile, the twin balance sheets problem — banks wobbling under mountains of bad loans, and indebted businesses unable to step up investments — is nowhere near a hardnosed resolution. 

On April 21, Modi spoke to an audience of senior bureaucrats on Civil Service Day, exhorting them to be more courageous and less litigious. The television cameras caught at least two worthies yawning as the prime minister spoke. A few weeks earlier, Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian, speaking at a book discussion on Rethinking Public Institutions in India, said the Four C’s the Central Vigilance Commission, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Comptroller and Auditor General, and the courts — had paralysed decision-making. 

Bureaucrats had absolutely no discretion to take bold decisions, Subramanian said. “The honest bureaucrat is risk-averse,” he said. 

Both Subramanian and Modi noted the high rate of inter-departmental litigation clogging the courts. “You work for the same government,” Modi reminded the bureaucrats. 

Underlining the alarming weaknesses in India’s institutions, the book I referred to, edited by Devesh Kapur, Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Milan Vaishnav, notes that as the population rocketed to 1.2 billion by 2011, the size of the government shrank from 19.1 to 17.9 million. In the two decades to 2011, the size of the Indian Administrative Service dropped by 10%. The combined strength of the IAS and the Indian Police Service was less than 11,000, with a 28% vacancy rate. India’s diplomatic corps was smaller than Sweden’s. The list goes on. 

Will Modi be able to tackle these, and a hundred other challenges? No question, if you listen to apostles like Information and Broadcasting Minister M Venkaiah Naidu, who was quoted the other day as saying “The dynamic leadership of Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi has transformed the nation and put it on the fast road to development. with the mantra Reform, Perform and Transform. MODI (Making of Developed India) movement was the story that is spreading all across the country”