Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurates and lays the foundation stone of various infrastructural and development projects, at Ekta Nagar Kevadia in Narmada on Wednesday. (ANI Photo)
The Prime Minister said some things last week that I found worrying and more than a little scary. Worrying because in this country that is the size of a continent, he said he believed that uniformity is the way forward and that anyone who does not go along with his vision of ‘one nation, one civil code, one ration card, one election’ is against the unity of India. Scary because he seems out of touch with reality. Modi spoke of how his slogan of taking everyone along was true secularism and believed by everyone. Somebody needs to tell him that most Muslims have become alarmingly alienated in the past ten years and that they do not trust the slogan ‘sabka saath, sabka vikas, sab ka vishwas’ anymore.
The Prime Minister was speaking on National Unity Day, an occasion he personally invented, and this time he spoke in the shadow of the gigantic Statue of Unity he built to honour Sardar Patel. Narendra Modi has regained the confidence that he appeared to temporarily lose after the Lok Sabha election. He has gone back to appearing in splendid isolation on public platforms to reinforce the image of being India’s only leader.
The event organised under the Statue of Unity was like a mini-Republic Day parade. Tribal dancers in traditional costumes performed, young girls in lilac frocks and tights leapt about in a weird dance and acrobats did acrobatics on motorcycles. And at the end of all this came a fly-past by the Indian Air Force. Then came Modi’s turn to address the nation. His speech was very, very long because he made it a point to list what he believes have been his personal achievements in the past ten years. It sounded very much like the speech he made from the Red Fort on Independence Day. And then suddenly a note of menace crept into his voice as he warned people to ‘identify urban Naxals and unmask them.’
Why is this worrying? Because in the decade that he has been prime minister, dissidence has been ruthlessly crushed in the name of eliminating ‘urban Naxals’. At this point I want to put on record that I do not believe that the elderly professors, priests and leftists jailed for being ‘urban Naxals’ were in any way a threat to India. If they were, then shame on the men responsible for our country’s security and for treating human rights activists and leftists like terrorists. What worried me about the Prime Minister banging on about ‘urban Naxals’ on a day he personally designated as one to celebrate India’s unity is that he seems once more to be distracting from real issues by creating phantom enemies.
For some months after losing his full majority in the Lok Sabha it seemed that Modi had understood the power of democracy and that he was willing to accept that it was not possible for democracy to exist without dissidence. After last week’s speech, he appears to have gone back to believing that the only meaning of democracy is to win elections. He also appears to have gone back to believing wrongly that the only way for India to remain united and strong is for there to be uniformity, even if it needs to be enforced by the jackboot.
The strength of India is that there is no uniformity. Languages, dialects, food habits, clothes and traditions vary so dramatically from one state to the next that it fascinates those who come here for the first time and discover that there is no such thing as typically Indian culture or cuisine. Having spent most of my formative years living in the ‘old’ India that Modi has tried so hard to refashion into a ‘new’ India, I concede that there were many things wrong with it. But there were many things right with it and one of the most important of these was the celebration of diversity and dissidence.
If Modi and his Hindutva fellow-travelers are determined to create a uniform new India, it is because they seem not to understand that not only is this an unachievable goal, it is also undesirable. We do not need to become uniform to be proud and patriotic Indians, but this is something that Modi seems never to have understood or perhaps it is something he chooses not to understand. Having spent his impressionable years in the RSS, he has learned that diversity is a threat that could lead once again to India being broken in the name of religion or political ideology.
The opposite is true. If India has managed to remain the only real democracy in this part of the world, it is because we have learned to celebrate our diversity and our differences. If Modi should have learned one thing from failing to get a full majority in this Lok Sabha, it should have been that had he been a less divisive leader, he would have been very much more popular. The glue that holds India together is not religion, it is our diversity.
If we continue to celebrate the different cultures and beliefs that exist in our many-hued land, India will continue to remain united. Uniformity is not something India wants or needs, so please, Prime Minister, can you stop banging on about ‘one nation, one law, one ration card’. It is pointless. There are more important things to be done.
