In power terms, political correctness is a reasonably modern phenomenon. In history, the blood and gore of conquest was usually cast in terms of valour, vision and the capacity to rule. It was understood statecraft was not meant for wimps. But another demeanour, far less militaristic, that works nowadays is that of the doer with a modicum of style.
Chief Minister Narendra Modi recently went to China with a large entourage of Gujarat’s finest business leaders. He went in response to an ongoing Chinese initiative sponsored by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. Among others who have visited China on a similar invitation are Chief Minister Nitish Kumar of Bihar and Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda of Haryana. However, Mr Modi is the only Chief Minister who can boast of Chinese rates of growth in his State. Gujarat has an overall figure of 12 per cent growth per annum, with even the usually moribund agricultural sector turning in a record-breaking 10 per cent last year. The urban population of Gujarat, at 40 per cent of the total, more closely resembles the demographics in China.
Our near inviolate shibboleth is that “India lives in its villages”. That profundity was pronounced by the Mahatma, Gujarat’s greatest gift to the nation and the world in the century gone by. Unsung as he undoubtedly is, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, also born from the womb of Gujarat, with a great deal more realpolitik to him if not the Mahatma’s greatness, comes a close second to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Mr Modi, also cast in a decidedly heroic hue, is seen by the Chinese as India’s Deng Xiaoping. For long on the periphery of national power, Deng Xiaoping, once he came to centre stage, placed China on its spectacular trajectory to make it the fastest growing economy in the world. Mr Modi, impressed as he is with Chinese achievements, is not content, however, to slavishly ape China’s growth methods.
He sees the business opportunity more as a Chinese one, and asked his hosts to desist from egging Pakistan on to make trouble for India. He mentioned the presence of Chinese in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. He also referred to Chinese maps that show large tracts of Indian territory, such as Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin, on the Chinese side of the fence. Mr Modi does not think such essentially hostile gestures are going to help Chinese companies secure lucrative Indian contracts in the infrastructure, telecom and energy sectors, among other things. What Mr Modi spoke in China was hardly the talk of a supplicant. To give credit to his hosts, they took his pointed remarks on board without protesting.
But even if China sees Mr Modi as a possible future Prime Minister of India, the Chinese don’t have to fight their way through the thicket of rivals like the Gujarat Chief Minister has to. The issue that stands as an obstacle in Mr Modi’s path to power at the Centre is the perception in certain quarters that he either caused or colluded with mob fury during the post-Godhra violence of 2002. While legally it may be impossible to lay any such blame at his door, his detractors continue to persist with this portrayal of Mr Modi.
The irony of the situation is that this country became free in the midst of unprecedented communal violence with at least half-a-million lives lost in the riots of 1946 and 1947. But it did next to no damage to the subsequent political careers of the principal beneficiaries of partition, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Jawaharlal Nehru. Jinnah, of course, coughed his last soon after partition, but you could hardly blame his tuberculosis on his politics. The third beneficiary of glory, if not pelf and power, was the beribboned Lord Mountbatten of Burma. But when he was blown up while fishing many years later, it was the Irish Republican Army that carried out the bombing and not any part of the Hindu-Muslim diaspora.
In recent history, there was Mrs Indira Gandhi’s invasion of the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar, the bizarre use of tanks through narrow lanes and the Indian Army. There were about a thousand casualties around the lanes, rooms, pools and terraces of the temple. The net effect was one of desecration and sacrilege. The ‘martyrdom’ of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, when a judicially-sanctioned noose would have been infinitely better, was a corollary and deeply-wounded Sikh pride a consequence. And then, there was the whispering from the shadows, echoing with the ghosts of Jallianwala Bagh located just a short distance away from the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
Later came the tragic aftermath, that of Mrs Gandhi’s murder at her home, and the thousands of Sikhs butchered in the national capital in swift retaliation. The carnage was organised, it is maintained to this day, by prominent members of the Congress over four days of barbarity. Yet it is the violence that followed the carnage at Godhra, where the provocation involving the deliberate burning alive of scores of Hindu pilgrims inside locked railway carriages occurred, and Ayodhya, where nobody was killed during the demolition of Babar’s mosque, which are held out as prime examples of ‘communal intolerance’ in this country.
Having control over the money tap of Government advertising is a good way to control the flow of news and analysis, much of it distorted and third-rate, as certain judges with extra-judicial views are prone to voicing. It is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, if one only casts a glance at the state of our judiciary and the functioning of our legal system. But casting stones at others is the sub-continental idea of free speech. Though we have never been much good at taking what we love to dish out.
Coming back to Mr Modi and the great ‘secular’ cant about his unsuitability for the top job because of his ‘communal’ credentials and belonging, as he does, to a ‘communal’ party, is so much talk that can harm our national progress. The importance of Mr Modi is that there is nobody from any party with his development record. As for his ‘communalism’, even if it is taken at face value, it cannot be seen to be any worse than that of any other politician, including Rajiv Gandhi who justified the anti-Sikh pogrom in 1984 in arboreal similes.
Deng the doppelganger was purged twice by Chairman Mao. But he managed to upstage Mao’s designated successor Hua Guofeng. He then took control of the second generation reforms that have catapulted China to its present prominence. Mr Modi has similar potential, albeit in a different political context and discourse, and this has not been lost on the Chinese. As for Mr Modi, he prepared for his visit carefully and made his presentation on Gujarat in correct Mandarin!
Source: The Pioneer
Chief Minister Narendra Modi recently went to China with a large entourage of Gujarat’s finest business leaders. He went in response to an ongoing Chinese initiative sponsored by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. Among others who have visited China on a similar invitation are Chief Minister Nitish Kumar of Bihar and Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda of Haryana. However, Mr Modi is the only Chief Minister who can boast of Chinese rates of growth in his State. Gujarat has an overall figure of 12 per cent growth per annum, with even the usually moribund agricultural sector turning in a record-breaking 10 per cent last year. The urban population of Gujarat, at 40 per cent of the total, more closely resembles the demographics in China.
Our near inviolate shibboleth is that “India lives in its villages”. That profundity was pronounced by the Mahatma, Gujarat’s greatest gift to the nation and the world in the century gone by. Unsung as he undoubtedly is, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, also born from the womb of Gujarat, with a great deal more realpolitik to him if not the Mahatma’s greatness, comes a close second to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Mr Modi, also cast in a decidedly heroic hue, is seen by the Chinese as India’s Deng Xiaoping. For long on the periphery of national power, Deng Xiaoping, once he came to centre stage, placed China on its spectacular trajectory to make it the fastest growing economy in the world. Mr Modi, impressed as he is with Chinese achievements, is not content, however, to slavishly ape China’s growth methods.
He sees the business opportunity more as a Chinese one, and asked his hosts to desist from egging Pakistan on to make trouble for India. He mentioned the presence of Chinese in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. He also referred to Chinese maps that show large tracts of Indian territory, such as Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin, on the Chinese side of the fence. Mr Modi does not think such essentially hostile gestures are going to help Chinese companies secure lucrative Indian contracts in the infrastructure, telecom and energy sectors, among other things. What Mr Modi spoke in China was hardly the talk of a supplicant. To give credit to his hosts, they took his pointed remarks on board without protesting.
But even if China sees Mr Modi as a possible future Prime Minister of India, the Chinese don’t have to fight their way through the thicket of rivals like the Gujarat Chief Minister has to. The issue that stands as an obstacle in Mr Modi’s path to power at the Centre is the perception in certain quarters that he either caused or colluded with mob fury during the post-Godhra violence of 2002. While legally it may be impossible to lay any such blame at his door, his detractors continue to persist with this portrayal of Mr Modi.
The irony of the situation is that this country became free in the midst of unprecedented communal violence with at least half-a-million lives lost in the riots of 1946 and 1947. But it did next to no damage to the subsequent political careers of the principal beneficiaries of partition, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Jawaharlal Nehru. Jinnah, of course, coughed his last soon after partition, but you could hardly blame his tuberculosis on his politics. The third beneficiary of glory, if not pelf and power, was the beribboned Lord Mountbatten of Burma. But when he was blown up while fishing many years later, it was the Irish Republican Army that carried out the bombing and not any part of the Hindu-Muslim diaspora.
In recent history, there was Mrs Indira Gandhi’s invasion of the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar, the bizarre use of tanks through narrow lanes and the Indian Army. There were about a thousand casualties around the lanes, rooms, pools and terraces of the temple. The net effect was one of desecration and sacrilege. The ‘martyrdom’ of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, when a judicially-sanctioned noose would have been infinitely better, was a corollary and deeply-wounded Sikh pride a consequence. And then, there was the whispering from the shadows, echoing with the ghosts of Jallianwala Bagh located just a short distance away from the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
Later came the tragic aftermath, that of Mrs Gandhi’s murder at her home, and the thousands of Sikhs butchered in the national capital in swift retaliation. The carnage was organised, it is maintained to this day, by prominent members of the Congress over four days of barbarity. Yet it is the violence that followed the carnage at Godhra, where the provocation involving the deliberate burning alive of scores of Hindu pilgrims inside locked railway carriages occurred, and Ayodhya, where nobody was killed during the demolition of Babar’s mosque, which are held out as prime examples of ‘communal intolerance’ in this country.
Having control over the money tap of Government advertising is a good way to control the flow of news and analysis, much of it distorted and third-rate, as certain judges with extra-judicial views are prone to voicing. It is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, if one only casts a glance at the state of our judiciary and the functioning of our legal system. But casting stones at others is the sub-continental idea of free speech. Though we have never been much good at taking what we love to dish out.
Coming back to Mr Modi and the great ‘secular’ cant about his unsuitability for the top job because of his ‘communal’ credentials and belonging, as he does, to a ‘communal’ party, is so much talk that can harm our national progress. The importance of Mr Modi is that there is nobody from any party with his development record. As for his ‘communalism’, even if it is taken at face value, it cannot be seen to be any worse than that of any other politician, including Rajiv Gandhi who justified the anti-Sikh pogrom in 1984 in arboreal similes.
Deng the doppelganger was purged twice by Chairman Mao. But he managed to upstage Mao’s designated successor Hua Guofeng. He then took control of the second generation reforms that have catapulted China to its present prominence. Mr Modi has similar potential, albeit in a different political context and discourse, and this has not been lost on the Chinese. As for Mr Modi, he prepared for his visit carefully and made his presentation on Gujarat in correct Mandarin!
Source: The Pioneer
