Modi has a frank conversation with the people
Narendra Modi's first Independence Day speech had a series of firsts to its credit. The Prime Minister spoke without being concealed from his audience in a bullet-proof glass box; there was no teleprompter; and no bureaucrat-prepared, written speech. His address was also markedly different in tenor from that of his predecessors. Previous prime ministerial speeches, especially in the recent past, have been sleep-inducing laundry lists of Government schemes and projects, littered with stale references to the Nehru Gandhis. But on Friday, Mr Modi did away with that template. Instead, he started a conversation with the nation — a significant indicator of how his administration hopes to change the state's old equation with its subjects, and re-imagine the manner in which this country is, not ruled, but governed. While reiterating his pre-poll promises of delivering development and good governance, Mr Modi requested, nay exhorted, every citizen to contribute to the process of national growth. His message of how every person has an equally important job to do, be it as a cabinet secretary or a peon, a farmer or a soldier, has travelled far beyond the national capital to the most remote corners of the country, where, hopefully, it has rejuvenised those who exist mostly on the fringes of Delhi's mindscape. Mr Modi recognises the power of the individual, and he has promised that his Government will leverage that to accelerate development processes. This is as it should be. The state needs to provide an enabling framework so that the nation may achieve its collective potential; it is not supposed be a charity organisation. Politicians, who have only ever thrown freebies at the masses to secure votes, have expectedly trashed Mr Modi's speech as “zero-impact”, with no new schemes for the poor. They don't realise that he has, in fact, promised the country a real opportunity to lift itself out of poverty.
In another significant break from the past, the Prime Minister Modi, on August 15, did some plainspeaking on India's faults and weaknesses. For example, apart from goading the people to do their fair share of work, he chided the nation for its dirty habits and low levels of sanitation, he took on the public for its appalling attitude on gender issues. True, these are issues that other leaders have discussed before but hardly ever has a Prime Minister used the ramparts of the historic Red Fort to talk about girls dropping out of school because they don't have to toilets or tell hypocritical Indian parents to raise their sons better rather than restricting their daughters. That Mr Modi is willing to have a frank conversation about these issues shows that he is a confident leader and, indeed, a true patriot: He knows the strengths of his countrymen but is also aware of their weaknesses and willing to address those.
True to his style, Prime Minister Modi steered clear of highfalutin statements during his Independence Day speech. Instead, he listed do-ables: Things that the people can do and things he and his administration plan to do. All the three major schemes he mentioned — the Swachch Bharat campaign focussed on sanitation, the Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana for model villages, and the Jan Dhan Yojana for financial inclusion — are action-plans. The proverbial cherry on the cake, however, came from two other pronouncements: The call to our neighbours to jointly fight the scourge of poverty (which fits into Mr Modi's South Asia-centric foreign policy) and the rare reference to the Maharishi, Sri Aurobindo, in acknowledgment of India's spiritual heritage.