It is just as well that President Pranab Mukherjee’s address to the nation on the anniversary of our 67th Republic Day is short on pep talk and homilies. Instead, the Rashtrapati has leaned in the direction of reflection, and certainly realism, while calling the year gone by a “year of challenges”.
The President has, thus, spoken of the “great virtue in acknowledging a problem and resolving to address it”. In this context, he does see an effort to build and implement strategies to solve these problems, though the problems he rightly alludes to are complex — for instance the “blowback” when the global economy is subdued, and the rural miseries that have piled up — as suggested by falling rural employment and incomes — on account of droughts and floods last year.
In light of this, the President’s hope, or rather ambition for India, that poverty may be eliminated in the next 10 to 15 years may appear to many to be overly optimistic, although it is true enough, as Mr Mukherjee reminds us, that India has invested in agriculture, manufacturing, health, education and science and technology, and on this account we should “also applaud what our democracy has achieved” even as we “complain, demand, and rebel”.
Three elements from the succinct speech stand out. One, in order to re-vitalise the forces of growth, India needs reforms and progressive legislation. In this context the Rashtrapati speaks of the “bounden duty of lawmakers (ie, MPs) to ensure such legislation is enacted”. This is a point that Mr Mukherjee is returning to. However, he also highlights the case for a spirit of “accommodation, cooperation and consensus-building” to be “the preferred mode of decision-making”.
Taken together, this portmanteau formulation is as much a reminder to the government as the Opposition in Parliament. Two, the President suggests emphatically that “our finest inheritance” is our democracy. He posits this while stating that “reverence for the past is one of the essential ingredients of nationalism”. Reverence for the imagined past is, of course, what the Hindutva forces really stand for, but Mr Mukherjee has turned that on its head to mean a (more recent) past in which Indian democracy was forged.
This has been collated with the “grim instances of violence” recorded last year when democracy’s “established values” were breached and “intolerance and unreason” surfaced. These references can be treated as guidance not to lower our guard against fanatical and communal elements. The third most significant aspect of the President’s speech is an indirect reference to India-Pakistan relations being blighted by terrorism. While Mr Mukherjee endorses the need for “continual engagement” to “bridge disagreement”, he cautions that “we cannot discuss peace under a shower of bullets”. A complex speech on the whole.
