It was a becomingly chastened Narendra Modi who stood at the nation’s grandest pulpit at the Red Fort last Saturday. Last Independence Day he was glowing with a newly furnished electoral mandate and had the “370” trophy neatly tucked under his belt. This year the Prime Minister could not be oblivious to the realities of an uneasy land; and, the country has slipped up badly under his watch during these last 12 months.
Much trauma
The India that Narendra Modi faced this August 15 was in desperate need of an assurance that the nation’s affairs were in safe, competent hands. A nation stands jolted out of its comfort zone as a foreign power has made ingress into our territory and there seems very little that our leadership or generals can do to restore the status quo ante. The nation has been forced to breathe the pre-2014 air of helplessness.
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The India this Independence Day is a land also devastated by an unseen enemy, a deadly virus that refuses to fade away. In March the Prime Minister had invoked the Mahabharata imagery to promise a decisive victory in 21 days; that has turned out to be just one more empty promise. Instead, India today has the dubious distinction of having the world’s third largest coronavirus caseload, behind only the United States and Brazil. Thanks to an unappeasable virus, India today is a land devastated by economic dislocation, disruption and destitution, a kind of suffering not seen in a long, long time, even if no one is talking — or wants to talk — of the millions of fellow Indians who were forced to migrate back to the comfort of their homes in rural India.
And, then, just a little over 10 days ago, the Prime Minister had made it a point of participating in an elaborate religious ceremony of a shilanyas in Ayodhya. That participation by the Prime Minister had caused apprehensions, especially among the country’s 200 million Muslim citizens, whether India was finally de-weaning itself from its secular commitments and promise.
It was this troubled context that invested the Prime Minister’s Independence Day performance with extra significance, because he had barricaded himself away from any obligation of democratic accountability, all in the name of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
The Prime Minister had a choice: he could choose to aggravate the nation’s fault-lines, take the low road, crank up sectarian passions of his base, or, try to undertake some kind of course correction. He must have known that much was at stake this Independence Day; serious doubts had arisen about the reputation of his government for competence and whether his own leadership has exhausted its inspirational touch. In particular, the nation needed to hear from him whether he was capable of changing leadership gear.
Strategy of rhetoric
In the end he did what he does best: dig deep into his rhetorical armoury to shore up the spirits of a deeply dispirited nation. But even by his standards, it was, at best, a belaboured effort, an over-the-top invocation of curative and creative potential of the “will” and the “dreams” of over a billion people. He had to necessarily give hope to a traumatised nation, and even promised that as many as three anti-coronavirus vaccines were on the anvil.
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Otherwise, Mr. Modi devoted much of his time at the Red Fort pulpit in an extended exposition of his government’s initiatives and policies — the kind of spirited account Prime Ministers ordinarily give at the end of the debate on the President’s Address to the two Houses of Parliament.
There was a sobering tone to this cataloguing of ‘achievements’ — an acknowledgement that slogans do not produce governance and that the un-glamorous task of brick-by-brick grinding chores still have to be performed. These six years have seen an excessive preoccupation with headline management but governance is certainly much more than the sum total of spectacularly manufactured events.
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Sober and muted
All this beating the drums of self-congratulations was predictable; but equally significant was the note the Prime Minister did not strike. To begin with, there was no Hindutva triumphalism. Many of his admirers must be dismayed that he did not pronounce the death of the Nehruvian republic; nor did he announce the birth of a Hindu political community. May be the Prime Minister is keeping his powder dry for the next electoral battle, but for now the minorities have not been made to feel spurned or unwanted. The republic has been spared needless trauma.
Then, there was no mention of China or Pakistan. These last six years the nation has been encouraged to feast on xenophobia and a virulent nationalism, which has paid rich electoral dividends, but there must now be a sobering realisation that the Chinese have truly settled the Prime Minister’s hash. The Narendra Modi who stood at the Red Fort this year must have understood that his over-investment in personal summit diplomacy with China’s President Xi Jinping only helped the Chinese size him up — and, the country has to suffer the humiliation of a military kind. The bravado was definitely muted.
Notwithstanding the periodic invocation of ‘national pride’ and the regular serenading of the valour of our brave soldiers, the Narendra Modi regime appears for now, determined not to let the hotheads in television studios ramp up conflict with China. The “LoC to LAC” formulation may not satisfy the belligerent Modi constituency, but the test of prime ministerial leadership would be to stay the new course of moderation and realism.
To the middle classes
A third significant course correction was an attempt to repair the relationship with the middle classes at home. There was this extended ode to the middle classes. Implicit in this wooing was a concession that too much of this mandir business and too much of an encouragement to the Yogi Adityanath-type of rough governance and rough justice can only cause deep disquiet among the Hindu professional middle classes — the very old, original Manmohan Singh constituency, whose defection away from the Congress had brought respectability to the Narendra Modi Prime Ministerial project.
Beyond electoral calculations, the Narendra Modi regime should know that the grand vision of ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ cannot be achieved without the requisite global skills and talent, which could only come from the middle class ranks. This serenading of the middle classes is a vital course correction, because so far the Hindutva cheerleaders have taken considerable pride in dismantling institutions and innovations of higher learning and research. The falsity of the ‘Harvard versus the hard-work’ binary seems to have finally dawned on the Narendra Modi crowd. Without a mobilisation of the middle class’s imagination, the ‘new India’ would remain just an over-worked cliché.
Narendra Modi practises with considerable finesse the demagogue’s familiar trick of imposing his slogans and prejudices as emerging out of a national imagination. But after six years in office, he has run out of enemies who needed to be tamed and vanquished. He can no longer avail himself of the excuse of the acts of omission and commission of past governments.
The onus is on Prime Minister Narendra Modi to help the country extricate itself out of a quasi-civil war and a sinking economy. After six years the nation is entitled to ask him to grow out of his deeply ingrained truculence and become much more than the leader of a political faction. He did hold out a hint.
Harish Khare is a senior journalist based in Delhi
