Opinion A class apart

Apprehensions had been expressed, rightly so, about children in schools being compelled to be Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s audience on Teachers’ Day. It was clearly not going to be an entirely voluntary exercise, with schools rescheduling timings and many issuing stern warnings to ensure that students listened to the PM. Modi sounded well-meaning but stilted as he spoke of the importance of the teacher and called for a “jan aandolan (people’s movement)” for “rashtra nirman (national reconstruction)”. Then, the PM’s speech concluded, students were invited to ask him questions, and the afternoon’s tenor changed. As he answered his “bal mitron (young friends)”, Modi was the consummate performer and communicator he has shown himself to be with other audiences. He talked to them without condescension, through stories that had morals, and shared anecdotes. He wove in the personal with the political. Of course, the spotlight remained solely on him, not on the teachers or the students. Yet, a cultivated remoteness and hauteur had been pierced. A new line was etched, one that connected, for the first time in a young nation, the school and its student with the prime minister and national concerns.

In his tenure so far, this is not a PM who speaks to the media or takes questions from it, or answers the opposition in Parliament. Prime Minister Modi reaches out to the people, over the heads of representatives, mediators and institutions. He used the occasion on Independence Day to talk to citizens with a directness that the annual ritual of the PM’s address from the Red Fort has lacked for decades. He created and conjured a similar moment on Teachers’ Day. He wondered aloud whether education was a better teacher or experience. He exhorted students to read outside the syllabus, and also to play hard. He told them about a school in Japan where there was little teaching, but “100 per cent learning” and spoke of the necessity of skills alongside degrees. He talked of the special importance of education for girls, so that “two families can be educated”, and the indispensability of separate toilets for them in every school. He asked students if they conserved electricity and water in their homes and explained how small steps can tackle the world’s energy crisis.

Advertisement

Of course, Manmohan Singh’s inscrutability and uncommunicativeness had set the bar unnaturally low. Then, the symbolism was carefully crafted, with Modi taking questions from students from Leh to Port Blair and Imphal to Bhuj via Bastar. And for many in his young audience, the Modi pathshala (classroom) stretched too long. Yet, on Teachers’ Day, as the PM spoke to school students, he made his office more real and “the people” less of an abstraction.