The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has spread so much happiness in 100 days that India has dumped Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and adopted Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) index for measuring progress and well-being. Average milk yield per cow has doubled compared to Congress rule even as bewildered beekeepers across India are reporting a quantum jump in honey production. Mineral water has replaced muddy water in rivers and lakes. America, Russia, Britain, France and China have announced that Indians are welcome without a visa. The Big Five are also pleading with India to join the Security Council as a permanent member.

Sorry guys I lied through my teeth. But I was just emulating Narendra Modi. Didn’t Modi go around India promising to usher in achche din, or happy days, if voted to power? Wasn’t Modi being economical with the truth too?

Growing international contempt for Modi as he completes a 100 days as Prime Minister is evident from New York Time’s blunt remark that the “man India elected this year is, in some ways, a cipher”. And according to the Washington Post, “that loud hissing noise you hear coming from India is the air escaping from the Narendra Modi bubble”.

I agree — there is no sign of happy hours, let alone happy days. On the contrary, high inflation is fuelling a high degree of resentment. Ordinary citizens who took Modi’s promise at face value are getting angrier. As things get messier, Modi is seen as having disastrously overreached.

I will confine my stocktaking to Modi’s self-obsession and its manifestations which are a mixture of the comic and the tragic. Wisenheimer is the perfect epithet for the man. He is evidently in love with himself. While Barack Obama’s mantra is “Yes we can”, I-me-myself Modi’s unstated slogan is “Yes I can”, or rather “Only I can”.

Modi is so unbelievably self-obsessed that he is marking his “century” by lecturing a captive audience of India’s school students on Teacher’s Day (September 5) via a live telecast by state-run Doordarshan and All India Radio. All government and private schools have been ordered to ensure 100 per cent attendance. No sooner the order came to light outraged parents and teachers were asking: “Why the heck should Modi be talking to our children for 100 minutes?” Many wondered if it was such a good idea to let someone America didn’t allow to step on its soil address young boys and girls.

Modi’s move to address kids faced stiff criticism as he is the only Prime Minister whose resume includes police interrogation! A Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) panel questioned him for as long as nine hours over two sessions to fix responsibility for the genocide of Muslims in Gujarat. It’s another matter that the grilling was a joke and he was temporarily let off the hook.

Significantly, no court has given Modi a clean chit. The ‘clean chit’ is a myth propagated by the Hindu Right and an irresponsible media — a blatant white lie which they keep spreading inspired by Joseph Goebbels who said that if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The truth is that Modi hasn’t been exonerated of complicity in mass murder. The possibility of Modi being tried isn’t ruled out.

Modi, anyway, isn’t known for his special rapport with children. I was appalled by a photograph of my PM pulling the ears of a small African boy he picked on while mixing with tourists in Kyoto during his state visit to Japan. It seemed to be a racist act, honestly.

Uneducated Indians are notorious for ill-treating Africans simply because of their skin colour. I asked several members of Calcutta Club where I usually socialise if they would even playfully pull an African kid’s ears. All the men and women I spoke to said they wouldn’t because it’s not a nice thing to do. Imagine the uproar if Modi had done that in London or New York. You are not supposed to touch young children — and certainly not allowed to pull their ears.

I don’t think Modi — who has a wife but no children — and youngsters really like each other. By no stretch of imagination do they get on like a house on fire. If you think that I am forever looking at Modi with a jaundiced eye, let me quote from Shubajit Roy’s account in the Indian Express of Modi’s interaction with schoolchildren in Tokyo. Although he took the trouble of playing the flute and the drums for them, Roy writes that “Modi did not elicit much of a response from students he met through the day”.

But an undettered Modi nonetheless asked children to read his book, Convenient Action, comparing it to former US Vice-President Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth.

Failing to hit it off with schoolchildren in Japan — where he at least enjoyed novelty value — should have made him realise that he isn’t good at everything. But he won’t leave the kids alone! Modi’s brazen move to shove his speech down their throat has marred the sanctity of Teacher’s Day marking the birth anniversary of the country’s second president, academic-philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.

Unlike Modi, he was as godly as the two Hindu deities he was named after. To hijack such an auspicious anniversary for petty politics is utterly despicable.

 

S.N.M. Abdi is a noted Indian journalist and commentator. He can be reached at snmabdi@yahoo.com