Banking on the mother: Modi's surgical strike on political photo-ops will leave you speechless

Trust Prime Minister Narendra Modi to make the greatest of sacrifices for the nation. Not only did he leave his family behind to serve the country most selflessly, he left two women – his mother and his wife – in different capacities for his nationalist cause.

Heeraben, his mother, is someone we get to see once or twice every year, whenever the PM needs a bit of feminine touch to soften temporarily his overly muscular brand of politics.

While India had got a rare glimpse of the Congress crown prince Rahul Gandhi waiting outside the SBI’s Parliament Street branch  to exchange some cash – the then stipulated Rs 4,000 – of course with his security deployment in tow, and causing the facility to be out of the aam aadmi’s reach for a bit, all for some quick photo-op, today it was the turn of PM Modi to strike back. This he achieved by dragging his 95-year-old mother out in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, in order to demonstrate how even the prime minister’s mother doesn’t have any special privileges when it comes to the leader’s “surgical strike against black money”.

Heeraben, a diminutive figure of stoic fragility, was seen “queuing up” (at least the voice-overs on news channels said so, and believe we must them) like any ordinary Indian, going to a bank and getting her share of cash. Of course, she was escorted by a retinue of women and men, but to think that the spectacle-crazy PM has forced this nonagenarian mother to be on a suitably telegenic bank experience is beyond words.

Not only has the PM “shed tears” while defending his ill-conceived, ill-implemented and utterly unsound-of-economics demonetisation drive, he has even bragged to 1.2 billion-plus Indians that his family had come second in his list of priorities. It was always nation first. Yet, to witness his 95-year-old mother being used like any other political pawn – all for a good television byte and headline management – was a pathetic exercise in political complicity.

This was opportunism at its worst. For many ordinary Indians, sending their ageing parents to fetch cash at the overcrowded ATMs are out of the question. No well-meaning son or daughter would let that happen. Social media is awash with accounts of angry persons narrating the harrowing stories of their parents trying to drag themselves to the working ATMs in the neighbourhood and help out during this countrywide dire straits. However, for millions of hapless and poor senior citizens, the reality is much sadder. A number of them have died waiting at the queues, many were severely dehydrated, have fallen sick, and even then couldn’t successfully obtain cash, a slice of their own hard-earned money.

There are several videos of old men and women narrating the extreme humiliation and inconvenience they had to undergo because of the PM’s whimsical declaration on November 8, demonetising Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes as of midnight that day. Many couldn’t avail treatment at hospitals, while others – particularly in the villages - suffered unnecessary panic and anxiety that all their savings in cash were gone.

PM Modi’s mother is extremely fortunate as well as unfortunate. Fortunate because thanks to her son, she would never have to truly live as an ordinary Indian again, facing rejections and hurdles at every step, even though she would be peddled as one. Unfortunate because her prime minister son thinks little of her but a splendid page one photo, a TV spectacle to fix his dwindling political graph. She’s merely a bankable card for India’s most powerful man, and that is one hell of a bad feeling, a true embodiment of powerlessness.

Also read - Modi should have chosen 'war gaming' over surgical strike on black money