That’s why everything you begin, must end in a victory and be hailed as a ‘master-stroke’.Įarlier this week, the prime minister made some uncharacteristic changes in direction. That would be admitting that you are another human being, not a divine figure or an avatar. It doesn’t expect him to say, ‘sorry friends, I got this one wrong’. The base adores him precisely because it thinks he is infallible. He never, for example, admits failure, a setback, anything that looks like a defeat, however small, or that he has erred. There are also things a strongman leader never does. They all speak to the base, and as long as the base is happy, they keep winning. We know most of the things a strongman leader in a democracy, from Donald Trump to Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Benjamin Netanyahu to Narendra Modi, invariably does.
But in a democracy, politics doesn’t stop, nor does political analysis and questioning. In this big, great national crisis, we should all shut up, and put our shoulder to the wheel. Growing alongside the crisis will be a call for unity, and clamour like, “this isn’t the time for a blame-game”. It threatens to grow bigger over the next several weeks. If last week we said this is the Narendra Modi government’s biggest crisis, it’s only become bigger since. The virus is washing through our bodies, killing thousands, crushing our modest health system, causing crippling shortages of doctors, nurses, medicines, even oxygen.
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