The Bill That Failed — And Why Modi May Have Wanted It To
There are moments in politics when defeat itself becomes strategy. The clever politician does not always win the vote inside Parliament. Sometimes he loses deliberately in order to win outside Parliament — in the minds of voters, in television debates, in drawing room gossip, and most importantly, in the nervous imagination of political opponents. What happened recently with the Women’s Reservation Bill and the dramatic weakening of the Aam Aadmi Party during the Bengal election campaign belongs precisely to that category. I do not believe either development was accidental. Nor do I believe the timing was innocent. The Modi government has spent the last decade mastering one political art better than any of its rivals: converting even apparent setbacks into psychological warfare. The Congress once did this under Indira Gandhi. Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have refined it for the television-and-social-media age. Consider the Women’s Reservation Bill first. Under normal circumstances, a go...
