In a little over 30 days in power, Narendra Modi was expected to perform miracles. His rivals in the Congress and elsewhere are demanding to know where the magic wand is. But Modi never claimed he had one
On June 26 just gone by, I woke up along with 1.2 billion people in the country with the grim realisation that nothing had changed in the 30 days of the Narendra Modi Government. The Prime Minister had fooled us into giving him and his party our votes in exchange of achche din. Inflation remained where it had been prior to Mr Modi taking over; the number of unemployed had not gone down; price of essential commodities were yet to crash to near-free-of-cost levels; the manufacturing sector had not picked up; the banking industry was still to be reformed; no fresh kilometres had been added to the National Highways; the Maoist issue had not been resolved; illegal Bangladeshi immigrants had not been driven out lock, stock and barrel from Assam; terrorists Hafiz Saeed and Dawood Ibrahim had not been flushed out of Pakistan or been knocked dead; China had not signed on the dotted lines of a new border agreement; the US had not apologised on the Devyani Khobragade fiasco. So, I say to the pro-Modi wallahs: If your Prime Minister could not achieve even this little bit in 30 days, what can be expected of him in the mere 59 months leftIJ
Nitish Kumar, Bihar’s Chief Minister until recently and an authority on secularism and good governance since the days he came into public life, has said that the month gone by did not indicate that achche din were round the corner. We have to trust his judgement. Never mind that he could not foretell the disaster which awaited his party in the lok Sabha election after he broke away from the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance, or that he confidently predicted that Mr Modi could never become the country’s Prime Minister.
Also, simply forget for the moment that, to ensure the victory of his candidates in the Rajya Sabha by-poll some days ago in the face of an internal rebellion, he allied with a leader convicted by the courts on corruption charges and who has as a result even lost his right to contest. Mr Nitish Kumar is convinced that by tying up with the very antithesis of his principled politics, the less achche log, his and his party’s achche din will surely come.
So, agreed that Nitish Kumar compromised, but it was for a larger moral cause. Andrew Carnegie never had to live through the crisis the former Chief Minister did, else he would have never said that “the ‘morality of compromise’ sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat.”
But as secularists who are determined to have Mr Modi fail, and indeed who are convinced that the Prime Minister has failed in the 30 days in power, we must not allow digressions that show up our own in bad light. Mr Nitish Kumar is far too much in love with himself to see merit in those he had discarded, and so he suddenly discovers qualities in those he has earlier considered as political scum of the earth. German satirist Georg C lichtenberg had famously said, “He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage — he won’t encounter many rivals.” Hail Nitish, he is unrivalled!
Then there are our other friends, the leftists, who can be depended to cry their hearts out and throats dry when it comes to the protection of secularist thoughts. They too believe that the Modi Government has failed to usher in the good days in the month it has been around. Did I hear someone snidely remark how the comrades had colluded with the Islamists in Kerala until some months agoIJ It must be some Modi-sycophant Right-winger fit to be crushed like cockroaches. let me remind such people of the fate that the Sangh Parivar activists have been meeting in God’s Own Country. Even cockroaches are at times spared out of pity so that they live a few days more. Not the Sanghis, and that’s what I call commitment to secularism. Keep at it comrades, since this is all that you have as past-time to engage you when out of power — that period could extend up to several years in your former bastions and to forever in other parts of the country. Also, do not forget the daily schedule of having a go at the Modi Punching Bag; it will help you release the pent-up frustration.
The Congress does not know what position it should exactly take. I can understand the party’s woe, having being born in its regime though not certain to die in it. I loved Indira Gandhi’s shrill speeches and Rajiv Gandhi’s bumbling remarks. I was but eight years of age when Jawaharlal Nehru died, so I cannot claim to have really lived through his time. But at least he mesmerised, if not set the stadium on fire. Fine, fine, Congress icon Rahul Gandhi (did I hear the earlier quoted nasty voice say how things have deteriorated for the grand old party to have this man as its iconIJ) is no match for them, but the two greats had not fought for women’s empowerment and the Right to Information as valiantly as Mr Rahul Gandhi. Moreover, Mr Gandhi has one quality that no politician possesses: He does not want to rule but only serve the people. His mentor Digvijaya Singh spoiled the party somewhat by exposing that the Congress vice president was just not made to rule.
Anyway, let’s return to the Congress’s dilemma. It cannot fully condemn the hike in rail fares because a similar proposal had existed in its rail Budget too; it never got implemented because Mr Manmohan Singh development cold feet — or should we say he could not warm up his perennially cold feet. It finds itself on slippery ground in condemning the increase in the prices of petrol and diesel because it too had pushed for such measures. The Congress cannot carp (though it is doing half-heartedly) on the removal of Governors because it’s a practice that the party converted into statecraft in the years and decades it ruled in the past.
American journalist Sydney J Harris had said, “Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.” The Congress faces a similar problem in its attitude towards the Government and internally too.
But so whatIJ Does all this give Mr Modi the right to behave as if he has a full majority in the lok SabhaIJ I refuse to accept that he genuinely has the majority, because the people, like my Congress friends have been saying, were “misled” into giving the BJP the 280-plus seats. (Do I hear that old sniggering voice again, saying that the voters were actually misled into giving as many as 44 seats to the CongressIJ)
I love to bury my head in the sand. So many bad things are happening all around with Mr Modi in power. More than that, the real reason is because I don’t wish to confront the reality that the anti-Modi forces are a discredited lot. I am a great believer in the saying, “Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.”