Modi's let India down for me
After Rahul Gandhi's recent "fair and lovely" jibe against the slew of schemes dished out by the present government, all eyes were on the next speaker for addressing the nation on a whole gamut of issues. The prime minister's speech was anticipated not so much in terms of what his response would be to the Opposition, but for what he had to say about the burning issues in our country at present. However, instead of dealing with pertinent issues on hand, Modi reverted to his trademark style of bashing up the Opposition for their hypocrisy and political expediency.
No matter how true the fallacies of the Opposition are, the nation expected Modi, the communicator, to connect with the denizens and not the orator who has mastered the art of skilfully ridiculing up the Opposition.
Having won a mandate which guaranteed alternative politics by communicating with the masses successfully (something Manmohan Singh failed at miserably) among other things, one expected PM Modi to engage with people in a robust, dialogical manner. The moot point, however, is to ask whether he has ever been a communicator who believes in the virtues of both addressing the citizens of this country as a whole and also listening back from them?
What Modi unfortunately indulges in is crass sermonising through his speeches, never to be receptive enough to digest the multiple feedback coming his way. This for a person who remains amazingly active on social media, especially through Twitter, that has really become the fundamental medium of communication of his much touted model of governance.
The problem with this medium, on a very basic and logical level, is the monologic, paternalistic form it acquires while expressing yourself in public. A similar parallel can be seen in his much celebrated "Mann ki Baat", which again is all about patting your own back without leaving any room for critical discussions. The irony is that even when he appears to speak so much, very little of it constitutes as communicative or dialogical.
At the same time, it is the power of oration and the histrionics attached to it that pay rich dividends at an election rally, sadly remains a periodic, event-specific phenomenon. It is never to be seen on another public platform engaging with various predicaments coming from all over the country - farmer suicides, inflation, development, minority issues being a few.
One begins to wonder whether all the issues are so trivial that they do not merit any significant attention from the person at the helm of the affairs? u
A perceptive sensitivity seems to be exclusively reserved only for the conformist, whose support is blissfully appreciated through tweeting. A group which forms an important part of this conformism is the ever-patriotic community of the NRIs that gets ample reassurances through Modi's busy globetrotting schedule.
The daily problems of the blue-collared workers for instance just do not bother him unlike those of the suave, well-settled middle class of the prosperous West.
Coming back to the domestic issues of reassuring the religious minorities against the rising majoritarian tendencies, Modi indeed has a lot of catching up to do. The prime minister seems to lose all the rigour and vitality he otherwise is so boastful of, as soon as an issue includes the so-called fringe elements. Fearing that the mainstream is actually getting appropriated by the fringe mindset (as we have seen in the recent past with a plethora of deplorable mocking and vitriolic sloganeering by BJP members), one would have expected him to categorically dismiss them all as violative of the constitutional spirit.
A "maun vrat" is what you see from Modi in response (which our former PM was mocked for during the end of his tenure). For a man who spoke so highly of realising a dream situation of seeing a Muslim with a cap in one hand and a tablet in another (during the election campaign), he was nowhere to be seen condemning the lynching of a young Muslim cleric in Pune, days after he became the PM. The delayed response to Mohammad Akhlaq's lynching (after some 60 odd tweets and eight days after the incident, according to an observation) is hardly soothing at a time when communal tensions seem to flare up at a brisk pace.
This is a place close to the national capital. One shudders to think what might be the reasons for the PM's reticence on the despicable agrarian policies of his party's government in Maharashtra, which has seen the maximum number of suicides in the past 15 years.
Maybe that is just too much to ask of someone who has always been a powerful orator. Communicative ethics are conspicuously absent. In fact, he and his party need them the most this year as all the five state elections seem to be a daunting task for them. How much sloganeering, histrionics and mindless hectoring will benefit the party is anybody's guess.
What the PM and his party surely need to strive for is the hitherto alternative politics to avoid withering or tapering away from the inevitable ephemeral nature of power to cast its effect.