Let this historic win be followed by a historic innings, which stuns the
world by surprises your supporters may not want of you but many more would want
to see you unfurl, writes Gopalkrishna Gandhi
Dear Prime
Minister-designate,
This comes
with my hearty felicitations. I mean and say that in utter sincerity, which is
not very easy for me to summon, because I am not one of those who wanted to see
you reach the high office that you have reached. You know better than anyone
else, that while many millions are ecstatic that you will
become Prime Minister, many more millions may, in fact, be disturbed,
greatly disturbed by it.
Until
recently I did not believe those who said you were headed there. But, there you
are, seated at the desk at which Jawaharlal Nehru sat, Lal Bahadur Shastri did,
and, after a historic struggle against Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, another
Gujarati, Morarji Desai did, as did later, your own political mentor, Atal
Bihari Vajpayee. Those who did not want you there have to accept the fact that
you are there.
Despite all
my huge misgivings about your deserving that rare privilege, I respect someone
coming from so sharply disadvantaged a community and family as yours, becoming
Prime Minister of India. That fulfils, very quintessentially, the vision of our
egalitarian Constitution.
Revisiting the Idea of Desh
When some spoke rashly and derisively of your having been a “chaiwala,” I felt sick to my stomach. What a
wonderful thing it is, I said to myself, that one who has made and served chai for
a living should be able to head the government of India. Far better bearing
a pyala to many than being a chamcha to one.
But, Mr.
Modi, with that said, I must move to why your being at India’s helm disturbs
millions of Indians. You know this more clearly than anyone else that in the
2014 election, voters voted, in the main, for Modi or against Modi. It was a
case of “Is Narendra Modi the country’s best guardian — desh ka
rakhvala — or is he not?” The BJP has won the seats it has because you
captured the imagination of 31 per cent of our people (your vote share) as the
nation’s best guardian, in fact, as its saviour. It has also to be noted that
69 per cent of the voters did not see you as their rakhvala. They also disagreed on what, actually,
constitutes our desh. And this — the concept of desh —
is where, Mr. Modi, the Constitution of India, upon the authority of which you
are entering the office of Prime Minister, matters. I urge you to revisit the
idea of desh.
Reassuring the minorities
In invoking unity and stability, you have regularly turned to the name and
stature of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. The Sardar, as you would know, chaired the
Constituent Assembly’s Committee on Minorities. If the Constitution of India
gives crucial guarantees — educational, cultural and religious — to India’s
minorities, Sardar Patel has to be thanked, as do other members of that
committee, in particular Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, the Christian daughter of Sikh
Kapurthala. Adopt, in toto, Mr. Modi, not adapt or modify, dilute or tinker
with, the vision of the Constitution on the minorities. You may like to read
what the indomitable Sardar said in that committee.
Why is
there, in so many, so much fear, that they dare not voice their fears?
It is
because when you address rallies, they want to hear a democrat who carries the
Peoplehood of India with him, not an Emperor who issues decrees. Reassure
the minorities, Mr. Modi, do not patronise them.
“Development” is no substitute to security. You spoke of “the Koran in one
hand, a laptop in the other,” or words to that effect. That visual did not
quite reassure them because of a counter visual that scares them — of a thug
masquerading as a Hindu holding a Hindu epic’s DVD in one hand and a
minatory trishul in the other.
In the
olden days, headmasters used to keep a salted cane in one corner of the
classroom, visible and scary, as a reminder of his ability to lash the chosen
skin. Memories, no more than a few months old, of the riots in Muzaffarnagar
which left at least 42 Muslims and 20 Hindus dead and displaced over 50,000
persons, are that salted cane. “Beware, this is what will be done to you!” is
not a threat that anyone in a democracy should fear. But that is the message
that has entered the day’s fears and night’s terrors of millions.
It is in
your hands, Mr. Modi, to dispel that. You have the authority and the power to
do that, the right and the obligation as well. I would like to believe that,
overcoming small-minded advice to the contrary, you will dispel that fear.
All
religious minorities in India, not just
the Muslim, bear
scars in their psyche even as Hindus and Sikhs displaced from West Punjab, and
Kashmiri Pandits do. There is the fear of a sudden riot caused with real or
staged provocation, and then returned with multiplied retribution, targeted
very specially on women. Dalits and Adivasis, especially the women, live and
relive humiliation and exploitation every minute of their lives. The constant
tug of unease because of slights, discrimination, victimisation is
de-citizenising, demoralising, dehumanising. Address
that tug, Mr. Modi,
vocally and visibly and win their trust. You can, by assuring them that you
will be the first spokesman for their interests.
No one
should have the impudence to speak the monarchist language of uniformism to a
republic of pluralism, the vocabulary of “oneness” to an imagination of
many-nesses, the grammar of consolidation to a sensibility that thrives in and
on its variations. India is a diverse forest. It wants you to nurture the humus
that sustains its great variety, not place before it the monochromatic
monoculturalism of a political monotheism.
What has
been taken as your stand on Article 370 of the Constitution, the old and
hackneyed demand for a Uniform Civil Code, the Ram Mandir
in Ayodhya, and what
the media have reported as your statements about “Hindu
refugees” in
our North and North-West and “Muslim refugees” in our East and North-East,
strikes fear, not trust. Mass fear, Mr. Modi, cannot be an attribute of the
Republic of India. And, as Prime Minister of India, you are the Republic’s
alter ego.
India’s
minorities are not a segment of India, they are an infusion in the main. Anyone
can burn rope to cinder, no one can take the twist out of it. Bharat
mata ki jai, sure, Mr. Modi, but not superseding the compelling urgency of
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s clarion — Jai Hind!
A historic
win it has been for you, Mr. Modi, for which, once again, congratulations. Let
it be followed by a historic innings, which stuns the world by surprises your
supporters may not want of you but many more would want to see you unfurl. You
are hugely intelligent and will not mind unsolicited but disinterested advice
of one from an earlier generation. Requite the applause of your support-base
but, equally, redeem the trust of those who have not supported you. When you
reconstitute the Minorities Commission, ask the Opposition to give you all the
names and accept them without change. And do the same for the panels on
Scheduled Castes and Tribes, and Linguistic Minorities. And when it comes to
choosing the next Chief Information Commissioner, the next CAG, CVC, go
sportingly by the recommendation of the non-government members on the selection
committee, as long as it is not partisan. You are strong and can afford such
risks.
Addressing the Southern Deficit
Mr. Modi, there is a southern deficit in your India calculus. The Hindi-belt
image of your victory should not tighten itself into a North-South divide.
Please appoint a deputy prime minister from the South, who is not a politician
at all, but an expert social scientist, ecologist, economist or a demographer.
Nehru had Shanmukham Chetty, John Mathai, C.D. Deshmukh and K.L. Rao in his
cabinet. They were not Congressmen, not even politicians. Indira Gandhi had S.
Chandrashekhar, V.K.R.V. Rao. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why the
UPA did not make Professor M.S. Swaminathan and Shyam Benegal, both nominated
members in the Rajya Sabha, ministers. There is a convention, one may even say,
a healthy convention, that nominated members should not be made ministers. But
exigencies are exigencies. Professor Nurul Hasan, a nominated member, was one
of the best Ministers of Education we have had.
Imperial
and ideological exemplars appeal to you. So, be Maharana Pratap in your
struggle as you conceive it, but be an Akbar in your repose. Be a Savarkar in
your heart, if you must, but be an Ambedkar in your mind. Be an RSS-trained
believer in Hindutva in your DNA, if you need to be, but be the Wazir-e-Azam of
Hindostan that the 69 per cent who did not vote for you, would want you to be.
With every
good wish as you take your place at the helm of our desh, I am, your
fellow-citizen,
(The writer is a former administrator and
diplomat. He was Governor of West Bengal, 2004-2009, and officiating Governor
of Bihar, 2005-2006.)
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