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American historian Eric Foner of Columbia University is a Pulitzer Prize winner. His area of specialisation is the reconstruction and rebuilding of the south after the American civil war (1861-1865). Sensing lucrative opportunities in the confederacy of the so-called slave states that lay prostrate after the four-year civil war, many northern soldiers of fortune made their way south.
They swept through the defeated states buying up assets and transforming them into fortunes. Named after the cheap baggage they carried, these ‘carpetbaggers’ were disparaged as vultures, come to feast off the defeat of the confederacy states.
That’s what Donald Trump is: a carpetbagger come to grab the remains of the Republican Party. Reeling from assaults by an assortment of extreme right wing groups that began to flourish during the administration of George ‘Dubya’ Bush, the party has fallen down an ideological mineshaft. Pulled in many directions by neocons, evangelists, white supremacists, soldiers of fortune, gun nuts and religious bigots, it seems to have lost its bearings.
From this miasma, Donald Trump has emerged to claim the presidency of the United States and the right to control not just the most powerful financial system of the world, but also the world’s mightiest military machine with global projection capabilities and the most destructive nuclear arsenal known to mankind. But Trump is an unrestrained megalomaniac who has an opinion on every issue with nobody aware what he stands for, except showmanship.
Likewise, India’s BJP icon and prime minister Narendra Modi seems willing to embrace the most egregious forms of bigotry, something America and India are finding hard to deal with. Unlike Trump, Modi already controls the resources of a $2 trillion economy, the world’s largest armed forces and a nuclear weapons stockpile of which little is known about its size, technological sophistication and chain of command. In that sense, Modi is way ahead of Trump.
For those of us who are shocked and awed by the rise of Modi, it seems depressingly possible that Trump could win the US presidential election in November this year.
Modi springs from a revivalist Hindu sect and has transformed bigotry into a winning election strategy. A narrow worldview bred by prejudice against Marx, Muslims and Macaulayites, hindutva, his bigoted agenda, was asserted by denigrating opponents and then weaving a fantastic web of deception promising an imminent El Dorado.
However, there’s one crucial difference between them. Trump emerged from the decline of the mainstream Republican Party that began with Richard Nixon down through Reagan and the two Bush presidencies. He simply seized the opportunity, carpetbagger-style, to catapult himself into the reckoning. Like it or not, he mocked the Republicans: I am your party nominee by acclamation of the white detritus, the type of people you wouldn’t admit into your country clubs or the towers I built for you; the type of people my grandfather’s Seattle liquor saloons catered to at the turn of the 19th century.
For his part, Modi also cocked a snook at India’s established liberal democracy. From hundreds of election platforms, he proclaimed that India is a Hindu nation to sweep General Election 2014. He attacked and denigrated the Congress party, the mainstay of the UPA coalition government that gave India ten years of unprecedented growth and a new spirit of inclusion.
Using innuendo and lies, Modi with the help of media subverted by advertising money, succeeded in portraying the Congress as a corrupt, anti-Hindu party which had perpetuated poverty and neglected infrastructure. It was an amazing act of chutzpah which enabled his party to win an absolute majority in Parliament with merely 31 percent of the popular vote.
Just as Trump had a free ride in the primaries, raining curses and indignities on journalists, Modi has enjoyed a two-year stint unquestioned by subservient media. Like Trump, he has kept them at arm’s length: no interviews, no press conferences; only one-way communications: government press releases, radio addresses, tweets and social media posts.
Now this brazen lack of accountability is beginning to catch up with Modi. The social media, in which he reigned unchallenged, have now become channels of opposition and ridicule. Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and other platforms are now being used with equal facility by Modi’s opponents. Also, new digital alternatives have emerged to the mainstream paid media: influential news portals like The Wire, Scroll, DailyO and Huffington Post, widely-circulated blogs in the digital editions of mainstream newspapers and television channels and numerous other outlets to reach audiences running into millions.
It remains to be seen if Trump can handle post-primary national scrutiny in the same scruffy way. India’s Modi will also find it difficult to repeat his sucker punch campaign in 2019. Comeuppance looms on the horizon for both the American carpetbagger and the Hindu revivalist.
(Rajiv Desai is president of Comma Consulting and a well-known Delhi-based columnist)