The eagerly awaited Independence Day speech of Prime Minister Narendra Modi did indeed turn out to be different from that of his predecessors in that the principal announcement made from the ramparts of the Red Fort — the dismantling of the Planning Commission — turns out to be of seminal importance.
It marks the clearest moment in the country’s life since independence when a legacy of the first Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, is being laid to rest, and constitutes a concrete example of a “Congress-free India”, which was the staple of Mr Modi’s campaign speeches and was reiterated as a goal by BJP president Amit Shah at his first address to his party’s national council attended by Mr Modi only a few days ago.
Nehru’s thought, which even non-Congress PMs felt obliged to follow in some measure, is the bedrock on which the edifice of the Congress Party has rested. Its jettisoning is crucial to delivering an India that has freed itself of the DNA of the Congress. Mr Modi took the first step in that direction on our 68th Independence Day on Friday.
Nehru had been impressed with Soviet planning and methodology for the allocation of resources, and thought of these as necessary instruments to map out ways of tackling poverty. Such was the value imparted to the Plan body that the Prime Minister himself presided over it. With that came prestige.
Mr Modi has done away with all that. He chose not to tinker with or revamp the Planning Commission to adjust to changing times. He got rid of it wholesale. This is the strongest signal he can send to the country’s private sector and to international capital that they can move centrestage on the economic template of the world’s most populous democracy, that the market is set to attain primacy of place in the next leg of India’s development.
Truly, this is a far-reaching transition symbolising India’s shift to the Right, and can said to be Mr Modi’s Deng Xiaoping moment.
Naturally, the PM’s speech was free from the litany of his government’s achievements, usually the most marked feature of PMs’ I-Day speeches. This was to be expected since it has been less than one hundred days since Mr Modi assumed office. So, what the nation was treated to was something of a polished version of his thoughts during the long Lok Sabha poll campaign minus his trademark assaults on rival parties.
Motherhood and apple pie — a string of exhortations about things it is hard to object to — characterised much of the PM’s speech: to build character, eschew communalism and casteism, ending terrorism and Naxalite violence, providing skills to the youth and setting up model villages.
