Opinion Independence Day, loud and clear
Prime Minister has revived a tired annual ritual to speak directly to the people
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Narendra Modi’s first Independence Day speech as prime minister — the first from one born after 1947 — marked a clean break with the past. The focus was not just on grand policy declarations or sops, there was no soporific litany of government achievements from behind a bulletproof screen. No muscle-flexing or sabre-rattling aimed at Pakistan. Modi, terming himself “pradhan sevak” rather than “pradhan mantri”, turned a tired nationalist ritual into a powerful communication opportunity. That he is an effective speaker is not new. What is new is his choice to touch upon issues that do not an August 15 speech make. He spoke to homes, cutting through the sound and fury over rape to reach out to parents, challenging them to ask of their sons what they ask of their daughters. He spoke to boardrooms, asking them to direct CSR funds to building toilets in schools. He spoke to MPs and MLAs, asking them to transform a village each under a new Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana. Suddenly, Modi isn’t the centrepiece of his development agenda — he carved out a space for the many stakeholders he addressed at the Red Fort, countering the rights-based approach of the previous government by foregrounding duties.
Clearly, Prime Minister Modi has left Candidate Modi far behind. The rhetoric of “achhe din” and the Gujarat model, the insistence that he would solve India’s problems with his bare hands — just give me 60 months — has given way to an acknowledgement of the difficulties of governance. Like the president the previous day, he suggested that the magic ingredient is the citizen, and invited public participation in a new national project. These were the confessions of a prime minister confident of his mandate. Modi is no longer the adversarial chief minister of August 15, 2013, when he challenged Manmohan Singh to a debate. He can now doff his turban to the contribution of all previous prime ministers, declare his preference for “sahamati (consensus)” over “bahumati (majority)”, and share the credit for a successful Parliament session with the opposition because he enjoys a huge majority in Lok Sabha.
Of course, the agenda and vision that Modi presented were along anticipated lines. He stressed manufacturing and exports, and invited offshore capital to “make in India”. He unveiled an ambitious financial inclusion scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, through which the poorest unbanked families will get bank accounts, a debit card and insurance cover. Importantly, the PM set some hard deadlines. He assured that the blueprint of the Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana — under which MPs can chose one village to convert into a “model” settlement by 2016, and then another two by the 2019 general elections — would be released on Jayaprakash Narayan’s birth anniversary on October 11. Similarly, he undertook to launch the Clean India Campaign — which aims to build toilets, including, importantly, separate ones for girls, in every school by Independence Day next year — on October 2. This, too, is the politics of inclusion.
But perhaps the most important signal of the prime minister’s intent to broadbase partnerships for development was a substantial commitment to federalism — the states will have a considerable voice in the new institution that he announced, which will rise from the ashes of the Planning Commission. Along with several other state leaders, chief minister Modi had been one of the commission’s most scathing critics, accusing it of intruding on the turf of states and trying to micromanage their plans without due competence. While nodding to its relevance in a former era, he rightly asserted that the centre of gravity of development had shifted to the states. A partnership between the PM and chief ministers, and coordinated action between them, is a sine qua non for development. While much will ultimately depend on the contours of the new body, the abolition of the Planning Commission marks a turning point in federal relations.
Great communication, but there are silences in the speech too. The communal incidents that have become commonplace in UP, the fears of curbs on publishing and the rewriting of history textbooks were addressed only by the suggestion of a mysterious moratorium on violence. The PM termed himself an “outsider” in Delhi, “isolated from the elite class”. He won’t be able to say this much longer. He is the epicentre of the new establishment whose roadmap he sketched in his speech and it’s against his words that his action will be judged.
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