In 2013, this was the venue where he spoke as the challenger, foreshadowing the “Modi wave” at the tail end of a sputtering UPA government. Almost 13 years later, Narendra Modi returned to Shri Ram College of Commerce Saturday as a third-term Prime Minister in the wake of unprecedented student protests in the capital that forced his government’s hand and led to the resignation of the Union Education Minister.
His framing, therefore, was clear. He was reaching out to students at SRCC, a highly selective college, a generation that will be first-time Lok Sabha voters in 2029 but were barely in school in 2013. He was also addressing the disgruntled young who, through their protests, have our under a cloud his party’s dominance over all rivals for the first time since he won in 2014.
Modi underlined this: he told the SRCC students that they were too young at that time to know the crises that had gripped the country then urging them to check the news headlines from those days. He signalled two messages: one, his 13 years had translated into better governance making progress on a range of issues and, two, those who were critical of him were out of sync with this young generation – they were the naaraaz fufa (angry uncle), he said, the source of all negativism.
In this, he was trying to distance the student protesters who were severely critical of him – he “forgave” them in an earlier message – from those who have always been arrayed against him. By calling them angry uncles, he tried to show that he wasn’t fazed by their attack, they were an irritant that had got triggered, he said, when he used “dimagi Naxal” in his Red Fort address.
Speaking to the students, he invoked Gen Z phrases as he recalled that he had talked to their seniors about his vision – using the Gen Z term OG (original gangster, used for the older ones among the Gen Z); how he had refrained from criticising the government of that day.
He urged the students to prepare themselves to scale new peaks as India prepared to become a developed country by 2047. “In your language, the alumni from here are OG. They have spread the name of SRCC across the world,” the PM said.
He made a reference to the recent hit Dhurandhar while referring to the college and its alumni: “Dhurandhar na ho, lekin dhoom to machayi hai (you might not be Dhurandhar, but must create a splash).”
He recalled his former colleague Arun Jaitley, an alumnus of SRCC who kept intact his bonds with his alma mater till his last days. “Our Arun Jaitley ji studied here, and I can say that perhaps there was no meeting of ours in which he did not narrate some incident of SRCC. Sometimes, I would get tired because he used to tell the same incident again and again…there are people in my team and my other colleagues who studied from here… It is not that only people from the world of economics have emerged from here but artists to leaders, lawyers to judges, everyone has come out from here, meaning the people of SRCC have made their mark in every field,” the PM said.
“I am happy that you are ambitious, because ambition cannot be taught by any coaching…Ambition comes from an environment that inspires you to dream big. Today a young person says, If I do something of my own, I will begin a start-up. If I build a company, I will make it a unicorn. If I connect with sectors such as space and drones, I will do something big. I will build cutting-edge AI solutions. I will bring innovation to agriculture,” Modi said.
He said that 13 years ago, “your seniors could not have such dreams”. But today, he went on, “you are dreaming these dreams also because today’s India has also created an ecosystem that supports those dreams”. He added that now was the time to set big goals and achieve them.
From internal security to terror, economy to global relations, he kept going back to 2013 to claim the “distance” travelled. “Friends, that was a day when there was struggle, struggle on every front in the country and this is today. Today, those spreading terrorism are on the backfoot. If Pakistan does any nefarious activity, India’s forces enter their home and strike…from Jammu and Kashmir to the Northeast, peace has been restored. The backbone of Maoist terrorism and Naxalism has been broken. The world that was worried about policy paralysis in India then, today that world is discussing India’s policy dynamism…”
He continued in this vein to reinforce his past versus present theme. “Remember, when you were perhaps still in school, when the Kedarnath disaster happened in 2013, the entire government was surrounded by the crisis. They could not understand what to do, how to do it. In 2008, when the banking crisis came, the government at that time had tried to bend before that crisis in 2007. It did not even have the courage to touch it. The entire banking system of India was brought to the brink of collapse. In 2008 itself, there was a horrific terrorist attack in Mumbai. The government at that time came under pressure from outside and did not even have the courage to teach Pakistan a lesson,” he said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi along with Union Education Minister Pralhad Joshi and others during the centenary celebrations of Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC), in New Delhi. (PMO via PTI Photo) 
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