In the article above, the Economist pits the new Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Stalin against Narendra Modi as possible rival of sorts when it’s time for the 2024 General Elections in India.
One may ask why the Economist believes Mr.Stalin is fit person to emerge as a contender for an all-India leadership role?
The Economist makes no secret of its reasons but adduces them in a rather circumlocutory way.
Firstly, the Economist hails Stalin with the glorious ethnic epithet “Dravidian” as if that alone qualifies Mr. Stalin to take on Narendra Modi just as his father (late) Mu. Karunanidhi, the arch-Dravidian of all who took on Indira Gandhi and all later PMs that succeeded her. For any leader from TamilNadu to be a reckoned as a force of any political substance in North India, it is sine qua non to possess credentials and more importantly, the image of being “Dravidian” and a rabid one too at that. That’s the wind in the sail without which the boat won’t sail. It’s also an identity that stems from the trope of David Vs Goliath—- the Tamil Dravidian is David and all North Indian PMs are Goliath. And the Economist which points out to the fact that “Modi is detested in Tamil Nadu” albeit his party, the BJP, admittedly is on the “ascendent in the rest of India”, believes it makes Mr.Stalin eminently suited to don the mantle of the new “little Dravidian David” from the south going out to slay the giant Aryan ogre of the North.
Secondly, the Economist thinks that because Mr.Stalin has retained as his consultants the team that he has just appointed that by itself, in fact, makes Tamil Nadu “distinguish itself from the rest of the country”! Duh?! The Economist does not however explain how the state “distinguishes” itself by the very act of this appointment?! The world’s best consultants, as the whole world knows, are all for sale and for a few dollars more even Tamil Nadu can hire a few of them. What is so “distinguished” about it?
The Economist however does explain that Esther Duflo, John Dreze, Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian , not to mention S.Narayan (another Dravidian?) , all but the last mentioned of whom are known to “have clashed with either Modi” in their previous “jobs” that they held in the GoI (i.e. Rajan and Arvind) or had gone about town advocating economic policies and nostrums that struck no sympathy at all with the PM. So, Modi simply gave them all short, swift shrift. Now, that Mr.Stalin has recalled them out of the wilderness of academe into which they had withdrawn after Modi had banished them, and has rehabilitated them in Tamil Nadu, the Economist sees that as some great masterstroke of political cock-a-snook: Mr.Stalin hiring a galaxy of international economists not on the basis of the real work they are expected to do for Tamil Nadu or to usher in fresh economic reforms but only because Mr.Stalin expects them to work to effectively expose and discredit Modi , the “haphazard decision maker” . The scope of the consulting assignment that Mr.Stalin has handed out to this highly paid team of advisors seems thus to be simply this: find ways before 2024 elections to do an effective hatchet job on Modinomics.
And lastly, the Economist makes an observation whose delightful irony, it’s such a pity, is lost on itself: The appointment has been made “to highlight the difference between Mr.Stalin and the PR-obsessed Prime minister”. Now, if Mr. Stalin had not made the appointment of this international bunch of Modi-baiting economists, would the UK Economist have ever deigned to give this Dravidian from nowhere land in TamilNadu in a far corner of India, the few columns worth of print-space it now has given him in its international edition? Now, isn’t that in itself a PR triumph for Mr. Stalin? Who is more PR-obsessed?
And how much do you charge clients, Mr UK Economist, to publish this sort of PR-stuff?