Happy birthday, Modiji: Five wishes as you turn 65

Dear Prime Minister,

Please accept our warmest greetings on your birthday. You're the first PM who's truly a child of independent India, and you're just a few months younger than the Constitution of India, which was launched the same year you were born in - 1950.

Modiji, as you're keenly aware, being the highest legislative official, you're uniquely equipped to steer the national destiny. Since birthdays traditionally become moments of reflection, may be a few resolutions - along with the bouquets and wishes from everybody - you must be deeply engaged in such meditation. Only, your thoughts today will be translated into our realities of tomorrow.

Everyone receives gifts on his/her birthday. Modiji, we give you the gift of a vision that we think you'd appreciate without going into attribution and retribution games. Mr Prime Minister, no one but you'd know the worth of ideas that spread and usher in the sense of a collective, crossing and binding diversities together. Modiji, we give you the recipe of keeping India together.

Rid us of the bans

Being free-thinking citizens of India, the mushrooming bans are choking us every day. What we eat, what we read and write, what we wear, whom we love, how we live, what we say - everything defines and expands us. Many liberate us, some help us grow as individuals. If you let some from your party or government curb and put a fetter on everything we do, how do you think it makes us feel? Unloved, uncared for by you, Modiji. If you were unable to eat khatta dhokla or khandvi, how would you feel? If you were unable to read Swami Vivekananda or Sri Aurobindo, wouldn't it constrict the boxing ring of your mind? Please Prime Minister, let not India become a Banistan.

Let artists and educators be

You share your birthday with the great Maqbool Fida Husain, whose centenary we're celebrating today. But it's with hushed whispers, a doodle on Google, and a quieter, more cautious, more apprehensive stance. We all remember how he left the country and chose to become an exile in Qatar, thoroughly disillusioned with Hindutva hardliners attacking his art and his love for India. Doesn't that bother you? Why are writers so persecuted under your leadership? Imagine, had there been a moratorium on your poetry! Why are histories distorted, blatant lies inserted, entire episodes airbrushed from textbooks in Gujarat, Rajasthan and other BJP-ruled states? Why are our best and brightest institutions made to suffer inglorious stints of utter humiliation? Why is knowledge, especially the eclecticism that springs from humanities and social sciences, not considered a skill in your India? Why are our teachers and students treated so shabbily in the Age of Modi? 

Why so foreign a policy?

Your conquest of the world stage is a matter of great satisfaction. Your pragmatism, tilting of the diplomatic axis, courting and being courted by the top men and women globally, are all matters of modern lore. But why this discrepancy in the case of the Saudi diplomat accused of raping two Nepali female nationals? How does your moral compass allow him to exit India when such a grave criminal charge is involved? Is your diplomatic muscle tired, Modiji, from flexing it too often in the United States or Central Europe? And when you change India's longstanding stance on Palestine to satisfy Israel, doesn't something tug at your heartstrings? When refugee policy is decided on the basis of religion, doesn't that diminish your towering status in the very same world stage?

Farm some goodwill

Battling a long dry spell, crop loss owing to freakish monsoon, insufficient subsidies, high freight charges, little or no compensation - farmers are killing themselves everyday in your beloved country. Your motto - sabka saath, sabka vikas - gets a bodyblow every time a farmer commits suicide. Though the Land Bill that your government wanted to bring in didn't pass the legislative muster, it was a threat to the millions of small farmers who depend on agriculture as their sole source of income. Don't the crop-growing rural poor count as smart citizens of your ideal India? Then why don't you give them a relief and make them feel wanted during your much-loved Mann Ki Baat?  

Laugh along with us all

Modiji, your sense of humour is one of the best things about you. Sadly, that trait doesn't get absorbed among your biggest fans. On social media and otherwise, "Modibhakts" ritually abuse women, threaten intellectual dissidents, beat up those belonging to religious minorities. They don't laugh along seeing a particularly telling cartoon, find faults with the silliest of jokes and memes circulating online. How can they be your "bhakts" without a sense of humour? Like Nehru, who used to have a hearty laugh at the cartoons pillorying him, I am sure you wink and smile at the caricatures in mainstream and social media? On your birthday, please urge your fans to do the same. Be smarter and cleaner by being more tolerant. Laugh along.

Many happy returns. Have a different year.