Narendra Modi will be India’s 17th prime minister. A sulking Advani, a teary eyed Jaswant Singh or a saddened Sushma Swaraj cannot stop this juggernaut now. Indeed the three increasingly resemble the Congress Party’s B-Team.
Modi’s rise was inevitable, the nation is in dire need of a messiah who will fix everything from roads to corruption, to getting rid of the dynasty that has ruled directly or indirectly this country for a long time.
The Congress’s misrule from 2004 onwards would have made anybody electable, leave alone Modi who has answers to almost everything. The man is invested with magical powers and will set India free. No surprise for a nation that believes in such men and miracle workers.
He is still an untouchable though for the liberal voices but the media, that had generally shunned him earlier, now seem to have come around to the view that he indeed will make it to New Delhi.
Retired generals, the senior bureaucracy and well-known journalists have all joined the band wagon. Surely all these worthies cannot be wrong; they have their ears plugged to the ground and know when to back a winning horse.
Let not levity however dumb now a serious discussion on the inexorable rise of a man who many of us including this writer thought was a joke; some nine months ago it appeared as though choosing Modi was the biggest mistake the BJP could have made.
It was argued that he would never ever be able to stitch together a coalition and therefore a less divisive figure would have been better suited to unseat the Congress Party. What a sea change, today it appears he and the BJP will carry all, on this rising tide; possibly get a near majority on their own.
How has this come about? Obviously a variety of factors and reams have been written by op-ed columnists. Modi it is said has finally broken the back of caste and community politics in India; don’t forget he does not belong to the upper caste like most of his BJP compatriots, nor is he a parliamentarian of long standing whose oratory within the walls of the Parliament have stood the test of times; not a versifier like Atal Bihari Vajpayee for sure. He is the ultimate outlier within the BJP.
In many ways he sounds like the 1970’s Sanjay Gandhi, remember the infamous Turkman gate demolitions of 1976, Modi is similarly a man in a hurry who has no time for history or past precedents, the here and now is what is important. To that extent he is the very antidote for the country’s predilection for miracle men.
He is pragmatism personified, false sentiments are for old men, and this is no country for the old; the young want change and want it all now. Ideology is for the dumb, his battle cry ‘Nation First’ overrides everything else for frankly there is nothing much to distinguish between the BJP and the Congress but for Modi.
Flabby welfare state
He is the Lok Purush —the new Iron Man— brushing aside falsehoods and venality in politics; willing to risk everything to pull this nation out of the morass it has fallen into and he will do all this single handedly!
This is what is pulling in the crowds and the ex-generals and the retired police commissioners and all the new patriots who want to remake India — far too long has this nation prayed to the false deities. Secularism, a flabby welfare state, a pusillanimous foreign policy and a national identity that celebrates diversity are the very ideals that have not let this nation of 1.2 billion people rise and fulfil its destiny.
Platitudes on history are a waste of time and as one reader wrote to me, saying stop harking back to times gone by; we need, he said, someone who will deliver results and if that be at the expense of the minorities or the rainbow coalition of different creeds and faiths so be it. And then he uttered this absurdly monochromatic view — India is a Hindu country and Hinduism is the very touchstone of tolerance and therefore they — the Hindus — will not be doing anything to harm India. It is this myth that fuels Modi’s ascendancy.
An electorate that has an attention span of a child and a middle class that has no time to read history but depends on TV news to give it a handle on its past and is obsessed with India becoming a world power, perhaps deserves a Modi. And maybe it will be a good thing too, when he becomes India’s 17th prime minister
. Either he will make such a terrible mess of the job and the RSS and Modi-ism — read that as born again fascism — will be discredited once and for all and should he succeed against all odds he would have discredited the dynasty and rid the largest democracy in the world of this horrible taint. Sadly in this struggle India may lose her soul!
Ravi Menon is a Dubai-based writer working on a series of essays on India and on a public service initiative called India Talks.
