Opinion Reverse Swing: In praise of Pranab babu

In this column some weeks ago, I was guilty of disparaging President Mukherjee, describing him as precisely the sort of geriatric timeserver that the country could do without in its highest office. How wrong I was; but in my defence I should say that my judgment was based only on the evidence then available. Pranab babu has surprised us all. I say this with no exaggeration: he may just have saved the soul of the nation.

The PM’s silence on the lynching of a Muslim man on suspicion of eating a food group regarded by a particular community as sacred had begun to assume disconcerting proportions in a country already on communal tenterhooks. Silence can, sometimes, be eloquent; at other times it can be a dereliction of duty.

In remaining mute on the subject of the lynching, the PM had come dangerously close to such dereliction. A man who had stifled a sob at the Facebook campus days earlier while talking about his mother was now, it seemed, unable to muster basic public compassion for a citizen whose life had been snuffed out in a brutal political murder.

Not everyone was silent, of course. Politicians of all stripes were braying aloud at each other in a public contest of competing stupidities. Political discourse on beef had come to resemble an Arnab Goswami TV segment writ large. India, and Indians, were in desperate need of an adult voice, a voice of grown-up sanity. The President, bless him, provided that.

In arguably the most consequential words ever uttered by an Indian president, Pranab babu said that “we should not allow the core values of our civilisation to wither away. Over the years, our civilisation has celebrated diversity, plurality, and promoted and advocated tolerance.” In the rewriting of school textbooks that continues apace in India, I trust that these words, too, will find a place. Let all Indian students read them, in every Indian language.

That these words were, by all accounts, spoken extemporaneously by the President at an otherwise banal book launch suggests that the hideous lynching in Dadri had given him sleepless nights. Here was a man with a conscience, a powerful sense of office and duty, who simply could not hold his bhadralok tongue any longer.

In speaking out, the President made it impossible for Narendra Modi to continue to remain silent. Modi was compelled to utter his clearest ever words on the need for communal and religious unity in India, turning this unfamiliar subject into a deft call for a shared national crusade against poverty.

Was Modi shamed into speaking out? We shall never know for certain. But ever the astute politician, Pranab babu was surely aware that he was offering the PM an opportunity to save face. His presidential cri de coeur was as artful as it was moving. He spoke out in defence of a secular India. And in doing so, he rescued Narendra Modi from his own worst instincts.

For that, let us give praise to Pranab babu, a gentleman and a patriot.

The writer is the Virginia Hobs Carpenter Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. @tunkuv