Opinion His opening
PM Modi strikes many a right note on development and inclusion that he will be held up to
It is possible to glean signals of intent from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s maiden speech in Lok Sabha, several of them heartening and reassuring. His government has a brute majority in the House, yet there was no evident triumphalism.
The election campaign he led for his party was aggressive, even abrasive, yet he resisted the lure of dwelling on the failures of his predecessors in power. He outlined his vision of development, but significantly also spoke to the insecurities and concerns stoked by cases of violence against women and minorities in the last few days — he didn’t take names but mentioned the murder by a mob in Pune of the Muslim IT worker Mohsin Shaikh, and the gangrape and killing of backward caste teenagers in Badaun in UP.
Most notably, Prime Minister Modi reached out to Muslims. He did not consider policies that targeted the community’s persisting backwardness as “appeasement”, he said, because the health of the nation depended on addressing the well being of its weakest part. This could be a consequential shift in the way the BJP speaks of, and speaks to, India’s largest minority. Or even from Modi’s own earlier framing of issues of backwardness, identity and community, where he sought to subsume the question of Muslim deprivation and disprivilege under the general rubric of poverty, and evaded the need to address it separately and specially by holding up the slogan “India First”, seen to have connotations of majoritarianism.
He sought to evoke the nationalist spirit — in his repeated invocations of the freedom movement and assertions of his government’s ambition to usher in a mass movement of a similar scale for development, a “vikas ka jan aandolan”, preferably in time for the 75th anniversary of Independence in 2022, or the 150th birth anniversary of Gandhi before that in 2019. But the overall theme and message remained encompassing, rather than muscular. In the same tenor, he underlined that the strength of the “Gujarat model” was a keen sense of its own limits — it needed to change from one district to another even in Gujarat, and to learn from best practices in other states.
There is much in this speech that PM Modi will now be held up to. The challenge, for him and his government, will come not from the depleted ranks of the opposition. It will be tested by its resolve, or lack of it, in doing what it says. And its ability, or lack of it, to deal with internal contradictions, especially on the question of the inclusiveness of its politics and development.
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