Modi is India, India is Modi

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. 

Ek akela aadmi sab pe bhaari.

Post script : After all, the investors who put money in the group did so, not because India is a land of opportunities, but because of the promoters' proximity to the PM. 

Stand by Meesha, or else shave your meesha

This week I got a whatsapp forward. The local unit of the Nair Service Society (NSS), a body that represents Nairs, an upper caste in Kerala, calling upon all community members to boycott Mathrubhumi newspaper till it apologises for publishing S. Hareesh’s novel Meesha (Moustache).

Then I got another forward, this one called the NSS resolution an interference in personal space and attack on individual rights. This message also warned that a boycott of Mathrubhumi will invariably help Malayala Manorama, owned by a Christian. But it didn’t question the assault on free speech.

Here is the excerpt from the novel which they are objecting to:

Why do girls take bath and go to temples all decked-up? A friend who used to accompany my walks till six months ago asked me once. 

"To pray," I said. 

"No, give a closer look. Why put on your best and doll up to pray? They are sub-consciously conveying their readiness for sex." 

I laughed. 

"If not why do they fail to turn up at temples four or five days a month? To let others know they are not ready, especially the temple priests. You know, they were the real playboys those days."

It’s obvious the chivalrous Nair men, or the Sangh Parivar elements they are backing, can’t have any of it. But we are yet to hear from any women about this, all the whatsapp messages circulating are valiant men pledging to save their sundar-susheel sisters.

Even these moral cops would admit that long before we got shopping malls, temples were where we wooed our girls. Where we schemed chance meetings to get the sandalwood tika on our foreheads by them. Many a love affair has taken root and blossomed in temples or ulsavapparambu.

Now, take the ban on women visiting temples during menstruation: it is not enforced the way it is in Kerala anywhere else in India. The character in the novel in his own way is giving a reasoning for a subject which is now being debated by no less than the Supreme Court.

If art, literature and films were to follow the Hindutva cowboys’ newly drafted moral code, we would have villains in films seeking the permission of women before a rape scene, drunkards reading out the ‘alcohol is injurious to health’ warnings before every sip of brandy and ‘shwaasakosam’ warning before every puff.

DC Books’ decision to publish Meesha is laudable. Such nonsense should be called out right from the beginning, and any attempt to censor must be nipped in the bud. If we don’t do it, we might as well shave our moustache and pretend it never was there. 

Malayalam writer withdraws novel Meesha after threats

If Hedgewar was a great son of Mother India, who was Gandhi?

Last week I was having beer with a few friends. At some point we decided to go to Haridwar. I was bored of drinking at home, wanted to drink in a new setting. Of course I wanted to take a dip in Ganga to absolve myself of all sins that I had committed till then, so that I could start committing new sins.

The point is there was a purpose to that trip. We do things purposefully, even if we don’t acknowledge it. Now what inspired former president Pranab Mukherjee to fly down to Nagpur and attend the RSS convocation ceremony?

There could be many reasons.

Mukherjee says dialogue is the essence of democracy. One should keep the dialogue on. So he wants to have a dialogue with an organisation which couldn’t tolerate a nuanced homage to Muhammed Ali Jinnah by L.K. Advani in Pakistan.

Advani had said, “His (Jinnah’s) address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947, is really a classic, a forceful espousal of a secular state in which, while every citizen would be free to practise his own religion, the state shall make no distinction between one citizen and another on grounds of faith.”

The RSS cracked down on Advani and later Jaswant Singh who wrote a book on Jinnah. This is their level of intolerance and Mukherjee wants us to believe he wanted to have a dialogue with the RSS.

Mukherjee probably rates his oratorical skills very highly. He may have thought he can reform, if not the Sangh leadership, the fresh graduates and make them give up their Hindu rashtra dreams. He is probably reassured by the successes he had while playing the role of mediator for the UPA. He had handled Anna Hazare so well his prodigy ended up becoming the CM; he neutralised Ramdev, who became a business tycoon, if not for Pranab the yoga guru could have become the UP CM for all you know.

Don’t let the Pranabda fan club in the media mislead you. Mukherjee didn’t go to the lion’s den and take the bull by its horns.

The speech in itself was mediocre. It could have been any of the speeches he made as President of India after Narendra Modi came to power. He just toned it down a bit, edited out references to gau raksha, lynchings, bigotry. In its place he copied a few lines from his other speeches about the 5,000 year old Indian civilisation, the sone ki chidiya that India was, the glory of Nalanda, all that are music to RSS ears. A Sangh spokesperson on TV channels said as much -- he said pretty much what we say. 

Mukherjee quoted Jawahar Lal Nehru from his book Discovery of India, but made only a passing reference to Gandhi. He said, “As Gandhiji explained Indian nationalism was not exclusive, nor aggressive, nor destructive.” Just one line on the Father of the Nation who spearheaded a freedom struggle that was boycotted by the RSS. Gandhi who lost his life to the ideology of RSS almost became a footnote in his speech, though it appeared in the middle somewhere.

The real news came a few hours before the speech. From the memorial of RSS founder K.B. Hedgewar. There Mukherjee noted in the visitors’ log, “Today I came here to pay my respect and homage to a great son of Mother India.” Anyone who reads it would think Hedgewar was some big hero who was denied his due by a repressionist regime for decades.

You could argue there is no need to read much into it. It was just an old man writing something about a dead man because he had to do write something. Journalists quoted ‘sources close to him’ as saying “What does one say of a dead man, especially who has been the Organising Committee Chairman of the AICC Session in 1920?”

Anything. He could have written anything. Mukherjee made a career out of writing convoluted, un-understandable resolutions with sentences so long, one would lose count and sight of the commas and semicolons. Anything Mukherjee writes, there is a method to it.

Arun Shourie very famously described the Modi govt as UPA + cow. Mukherjee’s speech was a bit like that -- RSS minus the bigotry.
So what was the purpose behind the speech?

The only good defence in Mukherjee’s favour I can think of is - he was bored, visited RSS headquarters for some sightseeing and went back after a guided tour.

In describing Hedgewar as a great son of Mother India, Mukherjee came off as an opportunist,  a backstabber and coward.

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