on the spot
Tavleen Singh
My dentist put it best. ‘Its like carnival time for you journalists isn’t it’, he said ‘watching the news on television is like watching a political soap opera.’ This comment from my very politically conscious dentist, Victor Rodriguez, came the day after the Prime Minister and Narendra Modi took potshots at each other in Ahmedabad at that function held in honour of Sardar Patel. Modi started the spat by saying more clearly and publicly than anyone has ever done before that India would have been a different and better country had Patel become our first prime minister instead of Jawaharlal Nehru. This comment evoked in our usually reticent Prime Minister a moment of unusual eloquence and he responded coldly that Patel believed, as every other Congress leader of that time, that secularism had to be a founding principle of a newly independent India implying that Modi had no right to associate himself with such fine models of secularism. After this exchange such a deep frost settled over the stage on which the two political leaders sat that I could almost feel it seeping out of my television screen.
It did not take long for cabinet ministers and Congress spokespersons to throw themselves into the fight with a lot of talk of how secular Patel was and how close to Nehru and what a proud member of the Congress Party. Shashi Tharoor jubilantly pronounced that the BJP was being forced to embrace Congress leaders because it had none of its own. This was not the only political soap opera on television last week. Even as the Prime Minister and the Chief Minister of Gujarat were having their little contretemps in Ahmedabad the Chief Minister of Bihar was busy sharpening his knives to attack Modi with in Patna. Attending a conclave of his party workers he dedicated his very long speech to denigrating Modi for the historical mistakes he made at his rally in Patna.
Instead of expressing concern about the bombs that went off at this rally Nitish Kumar concentrated on mocking Modi. With a sly smirk that never left his face the chief minister pointed out that Modi had not noticed that the Chandragupta he talked about was of the Maurya and not Gupta dynasty. That Alexander had never got anywhere near the Ganga and that Taxila was not a university in ancient Bihar. To make it absolutely clear that he detested Modi with a passion he also compared him to Hitler and mocked him for sweating so much during his speech because ‘he was overcome with excitement at the thought of being prime minister.’
If you have noticed that this is an unusually low level of political discourse you would have noticed right. Modi’s historical details may be dodgy but when he speaks about present times he has said exactly the things that Indians want to hear. He has spoken of how ‘vikas’ or development is the key to ending poverty and of how Hindus and Muslims should come together in this fight instead of fighting each other. He has talked of how important it is for India to set itself a definite goal for ending poverty by its 75th year as a modern nation. He has talked about the despair that has spread across India in the past few years because of the economic downturn, bad governance and rising prices and the reason why he is greeted by vast crowds at his public rallies is because he is saying exactly the sort of things that ordinary Indians want to hear.
Why then are his political opponents not taking him up on the political points that he makes? Why does the Congress Party’s most important leader, Rahul Gandhi, need to resort to silly lies to try and counter the Modi factor? Among these lies is the blatant lie that the BJP is a party that works only for rich people who live in air-conditioned homes. Another lie that tumbled easily from his lips was that the victims of the Muzaffarnagar riots were in touch with Pakistani intelligence agencies. This lie infuriated Muslim victims who continue to live in relief camps in appalling conditions. When it comes to the poverty question the most important question of all that Rahul Gandhi should answer is why he thinks there continues to be such horrible poverty in India despite his family having been in power for so long? As such a champion of the poor he must know the answer.
These are political questions that Modi has raised in his rallies and the response of his opponents has mostly been to charge him with fascism, communalism and making mistakes about history. If this is all they can come up with then all they are likely to do is strengthen the hands of Modi and miss the wood for the trees. I say this as someone who has in recent weeks driven across Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan and personally seen the anger and despair that exists among ordinary people not just in towns but in villages.
Wherever I have gone I have met people who say they are sick and tired of bad governance and cynical politics and that the reason why they want Modi to become prime minister is because they think he represents hope and change. When I have asked them how they have concluded this the answer nearly always is that they have listened to his speeches on television and have heard about the ‘vikas’ that he has brought to Gujarat. Modi’s political opponents have done their best to belittle his economic successes by saying that Gujarat was always a rich state but somehow ordinary people do not believe this. They have done their best to paint him as ‘communal’ and ‘fascist’ but ordinary people seem unconvinced by these arguments.
While walking to the venue of the rally in Kanpur some BJP hotheads rode by on motorcycles shouting ‘Jai Shri Ram’. When I asked the people I was walking with if they liked the slogan they said they had no interest in it at all. A middle aged man explained why in these words. ‘Today what we want are not temples and mosques but for our lives to improve. The reason why we have come to listen to Modi is because we think he is someone who can change Uttar Pradesh in the same way that he changed Gujarat.’ Could the main players in the political soap opera that we see daily these days on our television screens be totally missing the point?
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