Modi is the prime troll of India, his ‘raincoat’ jibe at Manmohan proves it

On February 8, the eighth day of the ongoing 2017 Budget session of Parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was scheduled to speak at 5pm in Rajya Sabha. Instead, he walked in at about 5.32pm, and started speaking shortly after. Halfway into his speech, he made the remark on former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that made national headlines: “So many scams and yet his career is spotless. Only Doctor sahab knows the art of taking a bath with a raincoat on.”

PM Modi was replying to the debate on the motion of thanks on the President’s address, and this was supposed to be the second occasion on which he’d explain the rationale behind demonetisation. Previously in Lok Sabha, PM had humoured that north India experienced an earthquake because Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi put the word “sewa” in his version of SCAM. In place of data, hard figures and arguments to bolster his demonetisation claims, once again PM Modi fell back on ad hominem attacks in the highest legislative body of the country.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that Modi is a good orator and he can keep his audience in thrall, glued to every word of his. But there’s a difference – constitutionally mandated: that speeches inside Parliament should be unspoilt by the harshness of electoral rhetoric. Time and again, on the rare occasions PM Modi attends Parliament, his disdain towards this “temple of democracy” becomes ever more obvious.

As Rajya Sabha MP and CPM leader Sitaram Yechury puts it: “What should have been a reply to a rich debate on the motion of thanks for the President’s address was reduced to a farcical street-corner speech. Personal insults to senior opposition leaders, including a respected former Prime Minister, is the only response Modi has to serious issues raised by us in the House.”

Yechury is echoing a sentiment that’s being increasingly felt in the rank and file of the Opposition parliamentarians. Recently, TMC MP in Rajya Sabha, Derek O’ Brien, flagged the issue of PM Modi following extreme rightwingers on Twitter, many affiliated to his own party, while others constituting the massive ecosystem of jingoist Hindutva “opinionati” who send out rape threats to women journalists, display rabid Islamophobia and raise the communal bogey at the drop of a hat.

In this interesting piece in TheWire.in, it is shown how PM Modi’s Twitter feed too is an echo chamber of his ideology, which he gives expression to overtly or covertly. While PM’s own tweets are seemingly dispassionate announcements or agenda-pushing opinions, such as praises of demonetisation, importance of Aadhaar and its imagined benefits in data mining, the necessity of Big Data as a benign part and parcel of a Big Government, what he reads on his Twitter timeline are exactly the very things that have humiliated and threatened journalists, liberals, left-wing or centrist intellectuals, academicians and even Bollywood superstars.

It’s little wonder then that the prime minister, more often than not, ends up betraying his Twitter feed not just in his campaign speeches, but also, and this is most grave, in Parliament. That his speeches in both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha – instead of fighting the Opposition with numbers, facts and statistics, as well as sound argument and economic rationale beyond the seemingly commonsensical but realistically disastrous notions that he “picks up” during interactions with those he chooses to interact – rely more on jibes, personal attacks, below the belt insults directed even at a former prime minister who’s much, much senior to him, and who didn’t even think of replying back, or leaving the House until coaxed by fellow Congress MPs, are telling.

Yet, of course, it must be remembered that Dr Manmohan Singh had eviscerated demonetisation, predicting accurately in Rajya Sabha on November 24, 2016 that it is a “legalised plunder and organised loot”. Singh, ever so reticent and quiet that he had been the butt of jokes from the media and the country which wanted a “strong leader” and got it in Narendra Modi, nevertheless told the Upper House that the demonetisation welfare shock would cripple the economy where it hurts the most, and would shrink the growth rate by one per cent. As IMF forecast its predictions, Singh stood vindicated.

But whereas Singh put forward rigorous economic logic, and his decades of experience leading the Reserve Bank of India, the ministry of finance and finally as the prime minister of the country, PM Modi responded with a jibe that was not only in poor taste, it was unfit for parliamentary proceedings. It’s for a reason that the word “unparliamentary” exists in the lexicon.

It’s not that previously Parliament has not seen ruckus or that MPs have not behaved ignobly, wasting precious session time and tax-payers’ money stonewalling crucial legislations, or neglecting to bring in reforms where they are needed. But this kind of negative candour from a sitting prime minister is unprecedented, and is a sign of the times. What Modi does in Parliament, Donald Trump magnifies it many times and does it in the White House.

If PM Modi’s social network is full of people who ritually flout the Constitution and indulge in hate-mongering and rape-mongering in the name of nationalism, Indian tradition, Hindu religion and other such reasons that are trumpeted by the BJP and its mothership, the RSS, what kind of legislative community does the prime minister enagge with?

Well, as the demonetisation episode proves once again, PM Modi hardly relies on expert advice, and his orders come from his own mind, which are then legitimised first by his inner coterie of political and bureaucratic lieutenants and then explained away by the right-wing commentariat in the mainstream and social media.

In other words, PM Modi’s “performances” in Parliament are not about civilised exchange of and debate on ideas, legislations, reforms, Bills, policies and politics, but a virtuouso replay of what he thinks he stands for. More than anyone else, PM Modi is aware of the necessity of trolling as the social and cultural capital that he can now streamline and fine-tune to make it appropriate for Parliament.

Exactly as Parliament is bulldozed and laws that would have draconian impacts on the daily lived liberties and freedoms necessary for a democratic republic are passed in the sly – as “money bills” so that they are not required to go to Rajya Sabha where BJP doesn’t have the strength, but where some of the best legal and legislative minds of the country have their membership in – the prime minister takes away the symbolic significance of Parliament itself. It is perceived less and less as a hallowed institution where one must be prepared to the teeth with facts, figures, policy interventions to fight it out like exemplary samaritans, but rather as one more place which has now been conquered and which can be used to bully the rest from the prime ministerial.

Not only is Parliament – in its workings – is being tampered with by cushioning the PM’s entry and exit, as well as his uncivil speeches, such as in this instance, by buffering it with one from say Union finance minister Arun Jaitley, a far more alarming allegation has been made at the ministry of parliamentary affairs.

CPM leader Sitaram Yechury has gone public accusing the government of working on the “diabolic agenda of editing out MPs’ speeches”. Yechury has said that even though no unparliamentary words are used by the Opposition MPs, the “verbatim records of their speeches are being tampered with, and parts of his address had been expunged, even though there were no such instruction from the Chair during his intervention on the motion of thanks to the President’s address”.

While Union finance minister Arun Jaitley ensures that Bills such as the Specified Bank Notes (Cessation of Liabilities) Bill, 2017 – according to which all the bad loans of the RBI against the demonetised notes would be extinguished in one fell swoop, thereby magically erasing the NPAs and basically airbrushing the million fiscal breaches to the tune of lakhs of crores from the economic history of the country – is tabled and passed in a single day, PM Modi, through his antics and attacks at Gandhi family members and senior leaders of the Opposition, particularly former PM Manmohan Singh, deflects attention from what should be the day’s top news.

But no.

PM Modi’s personal attacks are both carefully planned and casually uttered, whose semiotics keep the mainstream and social media abuzz, as ever more terrifying legislations are pushed down the throat of a choked parliamentary democracy. This is a two-pronged attack on Parliament, which Modi denigrates by ignoring most of the time, and attending only to divide the members further.

In the wake of demonetisation, there was a hue and cry and PM Modi gave Parliament the miss for days at length, which delivering speeches in poll-bound states, and even remote-addressing the Coldplay concert in Mumbai, where he made fun of those who were opposing this economic hara-kiri that would unequally impact the various sectors, aggravating those who are poor, leaving them without a stash of savings in cash and taking away their cash-reliant sources of income, while benefitting those who are rich and digital-savvy even more.

Instead, he launched the NAMO app, which did a demonetisation survey and found extremely favourable feedback. We asked then if Parliament were an app, would PM Modi use it? Just like the echo chamber of his Twitter feed, in which a loop of self-fulfilling illiberalism becomes the new normal and grows mitotically, out of its own substance, without cross-fertilising itself with opposing thoughts, with criticisms of any kind, for PM Modi, Parliament too must begin to resemble something he can tackle from a pedestal, not as an equal member of the country’s highest legislative body.

It is by now quite obvious that the PM’s brand of cultish and churlish politics needs constant dose of shock and awe, not civilised legislative deliberation inside Parliament. Narendra Modi is admittedly and proudly the prime troll of India.

Also read: Why AAP scares Modi

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