TK ARUN HAILS PM INDEPENDENCE DAY SPEACH

PM’s speech held vision of prosperity,

but maintained undertone of cultural nationalism

TK ARUN

As speeches go, Narendra Modi's first speech as prime minister from the ramparts of the Red Fort, was brilliant. Its significance lies not in the individual schemes announced, vision outlined or exhortations made but in the subliminal message, delivered powerfully, that someone is in charge. He spoke as a leader who understands the problems of the land and is determined to tackle them and is capable of doing it.

This is a reassurance that people need, being social animals living with one another. It had been missing in the years of drift under the UPA, when earnest Manmohan Singh read out anaemic texts while audiences dutifully struggled to stay awake, and his ministers schemed and squabbled to expand their individual fiefs, too busy to notice or highlight before the people the sterling advance made by the nation on every count from maternal and infant mortality to agricultural exports, telecom spread and power generation capacity.
Modi is a good speaker, and articulates well his passionate commitment to India's progress. The trouble is with the vision about the nature of the society that he seeks to take to great heights.
His own conditioning is as a leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an organisation committed to redefining Indian nationhood as Hindutva. His party, the BJP, an offshoot of the family of organisations spawned by the RSS, swears by cultural nationalism.
Hindutva and cultural nationalism are, in themselves, refined terms with subtle nuances that blend well with the aroma of good coffee at erudite seminars and in drawing rooms that host cultivated conversation.
But when acted upon in the multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-caste, multi-linguistic multitude that is India, Hindutva and cultural nationalism refract into hatred and vilification of the non-Hindu and the culturally diverse, leading to bloodshed and violence of the kind that India has been witness to time and again during the 67 years of its independent history.
As Prime Minister, Modi's own instinct would be to move to the political centre, to retain power for as long as he can. But the political strategy that brought him to power involves division and polarisation, of the kind that killed people in Muzaffarnagar before the elections and keep people on the edge in western Uttar Pradesh even now. The Sangh Parivar feels emboldened to act across the land, now that their man is in power at the Centre.
Modi's aide Amit Shah is today the president of the BJP. His efficiency in achieving a sweeping victory in Uttar Pradesh now puts a halo around his head but his track record is that of a ruthless enforcer who takes encounter killings in his stride. Modi and Shah seek to win the forthcoming assembly elections by hook or by crook.
Will Modi move to the political centre, dragging the BJP with him, to become in India what the Christian Democrats are in Germany, or will the BJP remain wedded to the RSS programme of clubbing India's minorities into second class citizens, whose security depends on sufferance by the majority rather than on constitutional rights?
Of course, the answer will never be found in explicit declarations. The fact that Modi called for unity and shunning of violence does not suffice to provide a clear answer. Especially when he deploys semiotics designed to keep the ambiguity alive.
Modi described the colonial government that people fought against as a sultanate. And he ended his speech not with the traditional Jai Hind, but with 'vande mataram' an urging to salute the mother, whose historical resonance is antithetical to the benign respect and affection a literal translation of the phrase denotes.
Muslims have been uncomfortable with Vande Mataram because of the overtly Hindu conceptualisation of the nation by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s rebellious sanyasins in Ananda Math, from which Vande Mataram the song has been culled out. The Sangh Parivar has used vande mataram not as an epiphany but as a battle cry, a challenge to those who dare see India as anything but a Hindu state.
The explicit part of the Modi speech made good the vision deficit of his first Budget. India is to prosper, with skilling, ubiquitous broadband, its utilisation for governance, healthcare and education, financial inclusion, a new thrust on manufacture. Modi envisions growth in a globalising world.
This is not new, but because, along with it, he proposed to substitute the Planning Commission with a think tank, people would be tempted to mouth phrases like end of the Nehru era. LIberalisation and globalisation changed the paradigm in 1991.
Does the call to end imports and turn India into an exporting powerhouse indicate a mercantilist mindset? Not necessarily. As a corrective to deficient local manufacturing, it is welcome. His financial incluson scheme builds on the good work done by the UPA in building a national electronic banking infrastructure with Aadhaar and the less-known National Payments Corporation.
Where Modi broke new ground was in his appeal, as a leader calling upon his people, to correct gender inequality and bring in cleanliness and end open defecation. These, he said rightly, cannot be done by government schemes but call for change in popular mores and conduct. By appealing for this change, he elevated himself as a leader of collective morality. The appeal to civil servants to bear faith to their responsibility served the same purose.
Modi's call for MPs to develop villages and chief ministers to work as a team with the Prime Minister is confused. Federalism does not lie in mixing up central and state level leadership.
Rather, it lies in leaders at each level of government, local, state and centre, being empowered, politically, financially and technologically, to perform the governance and development functions best performed at their level. There is nothing that an MP can do at the village level that a Pradhan cannot do better, if properly empowered.
The MP's job is to articulate his constituents' right to have a say in how the affairs of the national government should be conducted and to hold the government to account, not to run around cleaning ponds and building roads. To make them village developers is to delegitimise both their own core function as well as the village Pradhan's.
Modi did well, however, to call upon companies to use their corporate social responsibility funds on building toilets at schools. This will have two results. Schools will have toilets and CSR money will stop going to NGOs run by the CEO's wife/girlfriend.
Modi’s speech, in sum, asserted leadership, held out governance and a vision of prosperity. At the same time, it maintained an undertone of cultural nationalism that keeps the minorities on edge and gladdens the hearts of those dedicated cadre who had worked for his electoral victory.