Column: Narendra Modi’s favourite Number: ‘Make In India’

If you do an Internet search, even today, ‘Made in India’ would throw up not some Indian-made product but the now-almost-vintage 1995 Alisha Chinai (photo below) song that had become immensely popular during the days when ‘viral’ meant just a fever.

 

The opening stanza of the song tells us about the now Indian Prime Minister’s first two years in office: dekhi hai sari duniya/ Japan se leke Russia/ Australia se leke America. But then it moves to the ‘irresistible Indian male’ (56 inch chest) played by model Milind Soman delivered to Alisha in a ‘Made in India’ cargo box that the singer desires, rejecting the rest of the men around the world. (Since then the Indian male has been unleashing their masculinity in undesirable ways).

 

In November 2015, the same singer was invited to perform this number ahead of Modi’s Wembley speech where he was probably the second Gujarati after Freddy Mercury to take the stage at the iconic stadium. (Freddy was a Parsi from Gujarat born in Zanzibar but he considered himself a British singer. He was more like ‘Made in Great Britain’)

The ‘Made in India’ brand, whether the Indian male or any other product, was not quite functional any longer that led the prime minister to unveil a road map for the single-largest manufacturing initiative undertaken by India which he named, ‘Make in India’.

 

While Alisha’s song has a leopard growling by her side when she disapproves the various men from around the world till her dream ‘Made in India Man’ appears, Modi’s ‘Make In India’ has a robotic lion with nuts and bolts that gives hope of the nation finally making an attempt to move its haunches.

 

From defence to wellness, Make in India is opening up the country’s shores to never before opportunities; this month itself the government announced 100% FDI in defence sector.  The Minister of State for Defence, Inderjit Singh said this will make the country stronger.

 

Ironically, the same government has a different take on foreign funding for civil society organisations. Within a year of Modi’s assuming power, foreign funding to NGOs reportedly dropped by 30%. However, it is not Modi alone; governments in India since Indira Gandhi have been apprehensive of foreign funds (unless they were the beneficiaries!).

 

Modi has only made it more obvious. In the second half of 2015, his government cancelled registrations of 10,117 NGOs across the country. It cited valid reasons for this move. Greenpeace was shut down and Ford Foundation froze its funding to India. The Operation NGO was a campaign to restrain institutions from debating government policies or questioning them.

Over the past three years, according to a report, more than 60 countries have passed laws curtailing activity of non-government and civil society organisations. If that is correct we know what kind of world our children shall inherit.

 

If civil society organisations are called development partners of the government, then what kind of a country is Modi envisaging by throttling the funding of such institutions? His mantra or as he says the only ‘code of conduct’ is  ‘Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas or Collective Efforts Inclusive Growth’  but that is impossible to even conceive without strengthening grassroot organisations that play the role of helping the state push the envelope for the last mile delivery mechanism to be put in place.

 

A strong army cannot make a strong country. I recall P Sainath once telling me, “A nation that condemns the majority of its people to everyday indefinite insecurity can never be secure itself.”

 

But if the state is complicit in coercive tactics how has civil society really performed over the years in India? It is a mixed bag that evokes scepticism (like the parlance of ‘NGO types’) as well as admiration for rigorous and path-breaking work.  

 

Monica Banerjee, director at one of the country’s oldest and largest grant-making organisations, National Foundation for India says, “semantically civil society is a term imported from the West but its spirit and essence in India was that of Voluntary Actions or VA which has its roots in Parmaarth ( charity) and Seva (service) . Vivekananda's Ramkrishna Mission and Christian missionaries are institutionalised forms of these versions.”

 

Incidentally, Narendra Modi claims to be a disciple of Vivekananda!

It was Mahatma Gandhi who coined Rachnatmak Karya or Constructive Work for VA . This laid the ground for what VA means today. After independence, Gandhi had asked Congress to disband and the workers to travel across the country and set up organisations for constructive work.

 

Banerjee would argue that “civil society is really the space between State, Market and Family. This space is often blurred and overlapping with newer and newer definitions coming up everyday.”

 

In its contestations, however, even violent movements claimed part of civil society. Formations such as students protest groups for example identified themselves as civil society and that is where the state was alarmed.

 

 

However, in the 1980s (1985 precisely) the then government emphasized on the importance of having NGOs as arms of the state supported community and rural development programmes. By the 1990s there were some 1 million NGOs in the country.

 

Today there are 3 million. This overnight mushrooming (and many fly by night operators) of NGOs as contractors happened and it soon became a money-making racket. That gave the governments an excuse to restrain even the credible organisations and donors to step back from building institutions.

 

But in essence it is still one of the strongest pillars of our democracy. Just like a vibrant and independent media is imperative for the nation to progress, similarly, without voluntary action, without a fully functional civil society there cannot be a new India. ‘Make in India’ may be able to manufacture aircrafts but to give wings to the millions of underprivileged citizens of this country we need more and more voluntary action aided by civil society organisations. 

 

Kishalay Bhattacharjee is a senior journalist and author. His most recent book is Blood on my Hands: Confessions of Staged Encounters (Harper Collins 2015).  The views expressed here are his own.