Parakala Prabhakar: ‘Cylinders to the poor, airports to a friend’

The political economist believes that even if BJP were to lose in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, its brand of politics will not go away anytime soon.

“No single political leader can end a democracy; no single political leader can rescue one either,” write Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zilblatt in How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future. In many ways, this sums up the India of today, as political economist Parakala Prabhakar concludes in The Crooked Timber of New India: Essays on a Republic in Crisis.

Prabhakar does not mince words or try to deflect blame away from Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He calls him staggeringly incompetent and points to the utter lack of imagination in governance that has pushed a huge number of people below the poverty line.

Prabhakar, who was in Chennai to release his book in late July, gave Frontline a hard-hitting interview and repeatedly went back to the theme of democracy being a shared responsibility of all citizens, saying: “It is us, as a people, who must ultimately take the blame.”

You can read the interview here.