Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
These continue to be very busy times for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Nothing unusual for one who, by his own reckoning, is out to give an overhaul to the sputtering entity called India. Not a free moment for him, say those in the know. Not that anyone, least of all Modi himself, would have looked forward to having a less taxing regime to keep things moving.
Imagine all the touring he has done the first seven or eight months in office, jetting across the continents, trying to win friends and influence world leaders, conducting punishing poll campaigns to wrap up ever more States for his party chasing, for the present, the two thirds majority which he has promised himself but has eluded him for the present. The never-say-die man is still at it.
The upcoming Delhi election, a minor challenge considering the party’s confident mood, and his own about his invincibility. Mr. Modi is not the kind to leave anything to chance. And hence a no-holds-barred campaign with Modiji the lone star cast. Nothing daunts his ardor, not even the sparse crowd at his opening rally of the Delhi campaign at the landmark Ramlila Ground, which virtually marks the divide between the old city and the new that Lutyens built.
You can be sure he will be back on the rally route in Delhi for the next two weeks or so, before the first ballot is cast and just before the travel bug bites him again and he takes off on another foreign tour. Mr. Modi, to be sure, is very keen to get , as he told his biographer, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a colleague of mine briefly in the Statesman of the 1980s in Delhi, a two-thirds parliamentary majority, a distant possibility for now you might say , but very achievable, given his self belief. That would open up the constitutional route for him to pursue his objective, an essential ingredient of which unfortunately remains polarisaton. And he has yet to contradict his alma mater, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh which remains adamantly committed to Hindu Rashtra.
On a lesser scale this has been evident even in his party’s handling of the post-election mess in the State of Jammu and Kashmir; its double- speak on sensitive issues such as retention of Article 370 etc and the latest Home Ministry diktat, with the State under Governor’s rule, in respect of the contentious issue of the settlers who migrated to Jammu as a consequence of the partitioning of the sub-continent come to mind instantly.
The suddenness of the move and this at a time when the State is under central rule, has by no means brought any joy to the Muslim majority in the State, the valley in particular. On the contrary the valley sees it as a sinister move to alter the demographic equation in the two principal regions of the State.
When you see the usually suave and soft spoken Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office, Dr. Jitendra Singh, a BJP stalwart from Jammu, with whom I have shared space in the columns of this paper, urging BJP MLAs to get down to the business of responding to the needs of their constituents, virtually asking them to act as Ministers, till such time as the party formally takes over governance of the State. Frankly, I don’t know what to make of it. It is one thing to ask your MLAs to look after their constituencies and quite another to suggest they act as virtual Ministers. In a different set of circumstances it could acquire anarchic proportions if the 25 BJP MLAs were to take Dr. Singh seriously.
As of now, at the time of writing, I don’t see any alliance of the parties, say, the PDP and the BJP, or BJP and the National Conference and others, being forged to give the State an elected Government.
The Modi bandwagon meanwhile continues to roll on, its penchant for sloganeering showing no signs of wear. As Mr. Arun Shourie, a Minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government has revealed the Prime Minister likes to tell his advisers ‘arey yeh theek nahin hai, kuch dhamakedar idea do !” and what possibly could have been more dhamakedar than the two bashes hosted by his home State, Gujarat: one, celebrating the overseas Indian community (NRIs) and the other an extravaganza attended by an impressive gallery of personages, the US Secretay of State John Kerry and the UN Secretary general among them, a virtual who’s who of corporate moghuls from home and abroad , not to mention all the important Union Ministers unusually on hand to showcase Gujarat as an investment destination.
It was more a Modi show than anything else, and what a resounding success it was considering that several thousand memorandums of intent were signed and a few lakh crores of rupees pledged by domestic and foreign investors.
Gujarat,y’see, occupies a special place under the present dispensation and also because of the healthy investment environment Modi created in that State during the years he was at the helm in Ahmedabad. Consider that the Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley, who spent two days in the Gujarat capital, barely made it to a similar do staged by Mamta Banerjee of West Bengal in Kolkata; he did find the time though to berate the Trinamool Congress and its policies at a party rally to which he rushed straight from the not particularly spectacular West Bengal effort to woo fresh investment. No other personage from New Delhi considered Mamta’s effort worthy of attention, granted that Mamta’s West Bengal ceased to be an attractive investment destination after she drove the Tata’s and their Nano car project away from the State – and, ironically, to Gujarat.
Gujarat, as John Kerry explained in Ahmedabad occupies a very special place in the hearts of foreign investors, particularly in the United States. He underlined the point with much vigour and somehow linked the Obama visit to it. President Obama, said Kerry, will be the first US President to visit India twice while in office and the first to attend India’s Republic Day at the invitation of Narendra Modi (a Gujarati by coincidence).
These indeed are heady days for Mr. Narendra Modi and his party, even more headier perhaps for his colleagues of yore, seniors as much as juniors, from the saffron parivar but it would serve his and the nation’ cause much better if he were to heed the advice proffered to by someone who has lately come to admire him – the much respected Prof. Jagdish Bhagwati, Professor, economics, law and international affairs, Columbia University. Bhagwati who admitted that the Congress Party had in the past been his preferred choice but the Modi phenomenon had since drawn him to the Prime Minister (not because he is a fellow Gujarati he told an interviewer), who, according to Bhagwati, seemed to be on the right track.
The renowned economist sounded a cautionary note, warning Modi against the corrosive issues being raised by the RSS and some members of the ruling party which could well derail him. “I think the PM must be saying more things to hold these people back from capturing the imagination and (instilling) possible fear among large number of people. That can’t be good for his development agenda and that is where a little push would be helpful,” said Bhagwati.
While there is no obvious connection between social distractions and growth it would leave an impact in the long run as it would hamper legislative decisions in Parliament, the Professor warned.
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