Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his first Independence Day speech, showed himself a master orator, raising issues that had an instant audience connect. He also coined succinct phrases which will find their way to headlines, photo-captions and tweets — referring to himself as the “first servant” of India, to “zero defect, zero effect” manufacturing, to e-governance as “easy, effective and economic governance”, and exhorting foreign capital to “make in India” and export as “made in India”.
Not that he left his Hindutva cheerleaders disappointed. He invoked the image of Mother India (Maa Bharati), Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and Lord Buddha, and to India’s destiny (Desh ki niyati) as the moral and spiritual leader of the world (Jagat-guru). An army of Internet Hindus created during his election campaign will be busy propagating these one-liners for days to come.
However, his proposal for “a 10-year moratorium on casteism and communalism”, is difficult to believe as anything more than a virtuous profession. One will have to see the Bharatiya Janata Party and its sister organisations walk the talk — indeed, some of them are still threateningly invoking incidents which
Mr Modi referred to as “past sins” which should be forgotten.
But if we leave aside the communal divide — as Mr Modi tried to do at the Red Fort — the better part of his speech was practical and about achievable national objectives.
Mr Modi pointed to the distance between the modernist goals of India and the ground reality. He referred to a non-functional, inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy, high levels of violence against women, lack of toilets in villages and schools, the Maoist insurgency, abysmal poverty, and lack of skills in India’s burgeoning youthful population. By talking of poverty removal in the same breath as building toilets for girls in every school and for women in village homes, the Prime Minister reminded us of the importance of dignity in the lives of the poor.
He was perceptive in pointing out that the state cannot be the sole civilising influence, whether in checking open defecation or disciplining male attitudes to women. Society, he said, would have to be mobilised — especially the family — which had a responsibility in checking errant “boys” and securing the lives of women. It is important to hold a mirror to a chauvinist and casteist society which recommends gangrape or even lynching for inter-caste marriages by choice.
No one can take exception to Mr Modi’s dream of “Digital India”, with long-distance Internet-based education for remote village schools, telemedicine, mobile governance and e-governance. His call to all legislators to set up model villages in their constituencies as well as the scheme for bank accounts for all are welcome moves.
Mr Modi’s economic thrust was broadly neo-liberal — inviting the world to an investor-friendly India — and this was underlined by the abolition of the Planning Commission, no longer relevant when the economic role of the private sector had primacy over that of the state.
However, there were two troubling aspects of his speech. One, he projected an inclusive persona which is at variance with his known public image. And two, the economic path he wants India to follow may neither have the answers nor the instruments to address the inequalities inherent in our social and economic structure.
Even though he did not name the first Prime Minister of India, his reference to “India’s destiny” (Desh ki niyati) was a nod in the direction of Jawaharlal Nehru’s first speech at the birth of independent India.
The public image Mr Modi sought to project in his speech was reminiscent of Nehru — grateful to leaders past, liberal, tolerant, inclusive, reformist and with a plan for imbuing the nation with these very qualities. He should be encouraged to surpass Nehru in this noble task.
However, his ideological upbringing sees Nehru’s ideas of liberalism and secularism as essentially Western ideas that are responsible for India’s woes.
Mr Modi was not known for secular politics as Gujarat’s Chief Mini-ster, or as a tolerant person.
No one who came in his way escaped humiliation — whether within the party, like L.K. Advani and Murali Manohar Joshi, or outside it, like dissenting policemen and bureaucrats or even those occupying constitutional positions like Kamala Beniwal, the former governor of Gujarat and Mizoram. He would not even wait two months for governor Beniwal to retire gracefully.
There is also no evidence that some of the programmes he proposed so passionately were pursued in his 13-year stint as Gujarat chief minister.
Nearly 40 per cent of Gujarat’s population is still forced to defecate in the open, and its sex ratio is only 916 females to 1,000 males while the national average, as he pointed out from the Red Fort, is 940. One could even ask, how many model villages have BJP legislators set up in the state.
Of course Mr Modi might yet transform into an entirely different person by having to live up to the Constitution as elected Prime Minister of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural India.
The other disturbing aspect of Prime Minister Modi’s Independence Day speech is the excessive faith he seems to place on private investment as opposed to the role of the state.
He can demolish the Planning Commission by all means, but he must also note that the free market will not solve the diversity of India’s social and economic problems.
A pro-corporate policy that the Congress supported hesitatingly, and with some amount of guilt, Mr Modi wants to push to the hilt. However, corporate interests have no effective instruments to deal with conflict over commons and natural resources nor any interest in protecting the most vulnerable, impoverished and insecure sections of the population which leave alone participating in that economy have become its worst victims.
The state then cannot and must not put all its weight behind a corporate agenda. It should not run businesses, but it has a larger role to perform in an iniquitous society such as ours and, therefore, a wider accountability.
The writer is a journalist based in New Delhi
