When Narendra Modi speaks in Parliament, which is rare, everyone listens. His fans, his critics, his trolls, pretty much everyone. And he never lets us down.
This week, the PM spoke his mind, wearing a jacket of recycled plastic according
to his PR machinery, but evidently the man himself thought it was Teflon. The speech
exuded such confidence.
There are two ways I listen to his speech. One, I read between the lines. Two,
I do not read between the lines. Then, by now you all know, I employ the good
old Sherlock Holmes principle - When you have eliminated all which is
impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
So when Modi said, “If Nehru is such a great man, why are his grandkids and great grand kids not using the Nehru surname”, many took it as another attempt to belittle the country’s first prime minister, an intellectual giant, the kind of who we rarely see. But not me.
I thought and over-thought the remark in my head many times over.
I dissected it with scalpel blade 15. And finally came to a conclusion.
Suppose Indira Priyadarshini had retained her father’s surname instead of adding
her husband’s after marriage. Suppose Indira’s sons took their mother’s surname
instead of their father’s. Too many suppositions, I know, but you must not lose
track. Suppose their kids took their surname from their mothers instead of
their father. It would have been a tremendous strike at the root of patriarchy coming
straight from the First Family of India. Now the Leader’s statement starts making
sense. Immense sense.
Not everything Modi said came coded in Greek. Most of it was plainspeak.
He said the UPA converted every opportunity into a scam. Isn’t that true? Even
when there was no scam, Manmohan Singh’s partymen told us there is one, to
polish the heir apparent’s resume, to present him as the hero who will set all things
that are wrong with the UPA right. For some strange reason the heir refused to join
the govt and clean up the mess, instead waiting for the elections. The voter had
different ideas.
The most controversial bits in Modi’s speeches came in two parts
over two days.
“The country trusts me and not the abuses and accusations you throw at me.”
“Ek akela kitno pe bhaari pad raha hai.”
He is just being truthful.
If hours long queues to take money out of ATM could not unseat him, if thousands
of deaths caused by oxygen shortage could not unseat his party in Uttar
Pradesh, nothing else will. Definitely not a businessman out to make some quick
buck.
Nor a cross-country yatra to unite the country. For starters, how do you unite a country where the majority feels there are no divisions.
The likes of Mani Shankar Aiyar and Chidambaram and Jairam Ramesh will remind
you how JP dethroned Indira and how VP Singh defeated Rajiv Gandhi.
There is a big difference.
Indira made an enemy of every Opposition leader. All of them ganged up with the
common aim of toppling her and with personal ambitions of becoming PM.
Her son was no great politician and opposition had the self-belief – if Indira can
be defeated, then Rajiv certainly can be.
Modi has learnt from the mistakes of Indira, Rajiv and Manmohan.
One, don’t give opposition leaders a reason to gang up against him. So he will give
Naveen Patnaik, Jagan Reddy, K Chandrasekhar Rao, Akhilesh Yadav, etc their
free space at the state level. The opposition is perennially divided.
Two, rule with an iron fist when you have such a brutal majority. Rajiv
suffered because VP Singh, right under his nose, turned against him, rather the
PM allowed him to.
Three, never let the public get even a whiff of a scam even if there is one.
Ignore charges being leveled by the Opposition unlike Manmohan who would sack
ministers and order investigations. Modi has one advantage. The fear factor. From
the fourth estate to pretty much every estate, no one dare point a finger at him.
Modi is bigger than the BJP. Modi is bigger than the RSS. The
trouble is he knows it, though his modesty doesn’t let him say so openly.
“Ek akela kitno pe bhaari
pad raha hai.”
When Modi said that, thumping his Chappan Chaathi multiple times, his party colleagues
in the ministry and Parliament, stood up to give him an ovation. As they did
that, they saw something we didn’t on the TV, thanks to their privileged seats right
next to the PM. They spotted the Halo.
To them, and sadly many more outside, Modi is India and India is Modi.
