by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group
By inviting the SAARC heads of governments to his swearing in ceremony, Modi again had a one up on his predecessors. What was SAARC till then other than a signboard? How did its members perceive India, its pivot? While SAARC lacked any real glue, India has remained to almost all of them a source of envy and fear, like the big bully next door. Nothing from India seemed to have appealed to them, not even its time-tested and gigantic democracy. In the twilight hours of May 26, Modi got the neighbors all with him and seemed ready to change their age-old perceptions at one go. It was a unique marketing of democracy. A democracy that neither falters nor fumbles; that doesn't wait for the permission of the men in khaki uniforms to take over the center stage.
It was an uphill task. How difficult it was became evident in the three days that took Islamabad to digest the invitation, and finally to get the sanction of the seemingly all-important army to let prime minister Sharief board the flight to Delhi. Equally problem-ridden was to get Sri Lanka President Mahinda Rajapaksa on board, with BJP's Tamil ally, like Vaiko, and a 'friend' like Jayalalitha, making such an issue out of it that the former made a spectacle of himself by holding an anti-Rakapakse rally in Delhi on the same day and the latter boycotting the function, in line with known Modi-critics like Mamata Banerjee, and assorted communists (and also Naveen Patnaik, no one knows why).
However, the swearing-in celebration also bore the hallmark of Modi's out-of-the-box thinking. It is true that the inclusiveness of BJP in the Lok Sabha is stymied because it has no Muslim member. Non-acceptance of BJP by the largest minority is a historical fact. Modi surely wants to undo it. It is evident from his choice of 74-year-old Najma Heptulla as Minority Affairs Minister. Heptulla is a grand-niece of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India's first education minister. She is a valuable link to independent India's Nehruvian past and its syncretism culture. Earlier, BJP experimented with quite a few Muslim leaders. But none of them had the social and cultural status that Heptulla brings to the table. If a new deal with the largest minority community is necessary, none can initiate it better than Heptulla.
A grand opening
It was a sultry evening, sweaty in the stillness that
goes with the nimbus clouds gathering in the sky. The sun was setting lazily on
the forecourt of Rashtrapati Bhavan. And there, in the throng of four thousand
invitees, amid the oaths starting with "I" and spoken in varied
accents, one could for a while forget it was Narendra Modi being sworn in as
the 15th Prime Minister of India, with his twenty three cabinet ministers and
twenty two junior ones in tow. As the television cameras panned across the faces
of distinguished guests from the neighboring SAARC countries, Pakistan Prime
Minister Nawaz Sharief and Afghanistan
President Hamid Karzai included, it acquired the character of a road show. A
vast road show of democracy. The largest till now in South
Asia.
It brought to mind old memories of Alexis de
Tocqueville's 19th century journey to America,
in his Democracy in America,
when he was surprised by the New World's
communitarian spirit, its fiercely free Press, the servants who behaved like
neighbors and President Andrew Jackson who could be met without appointment. To
the son of a royalist, whose father had died under the guillotine, a visit to America
in the 1830's was the discovery of the future of democracy, not its past in his
own country where the overzealous children of the Revolution had almost killed
it in its cradle.
By inviting the SAARC heads of governments to his swearing in ceremony, Modi again had a one up on his predecessors. What was SAARC till then other than a signboard? How did its members perceive India, its pivot? While SAARC lacked any real glue, India has remained to almost all of them a source of envy and fear, like the big bully next door. Nothing from India seemed to have appealed to them, not even its time-tested and gigantic democracy. In the twilight hours of May 26, Modi got the neighbors all with him and seemed ready to change their age-old perceptions at one go. It was a unique marketing of democracy. A democracy that neither falters nor fumbles; that doesn't wait for the permission of the men in khaki uniforms to take over the center stage.
It was an uphill task. How difficult it was became evident in the three days that took Islamabad to digest the invitation, and finally to get the sanction of the seemingly all-important army to let prime minister Sharief board the flight to Delhi. Equally problem-ridden was to get Sri Lanka President Mahinda Rajapaksa on board, with BJP's Tamil ally, like Vaiko, and a 'friend' like Jayalalitha, making such an issue out of it that the former made a spectacle of himself by holding an anti-Rakapakse rally in Delhi on the same day and the latter boycotting the function, in line with known Modi-critics like Mamata Banerjee, and assorted communists (and also Naveen Patnaik, no one knows why).
Against all odds, the representatives of all the eight
SAARC members assembled at the forecourt of the awesome building that architect
Lutyen, son-in-law of the imperialist Lord Lytton, had designed for the British
Viceroys. Democracy, as Tocqueville had discovered, is not a formula of
statecraft drafted on a piece of paper. It is full of sights and sounds,
something that the SAARC heads of government have no doubt collected from the
sultry evening on Delhi's
Raisina Hill. They witnessed Modi's arch rival and Congress president Sonia
Gandhi, accompanied by her son and party vice president Rahul, walk into Modi's
swearing-in ceremony with their heads held high.
While the Sri
Lanka dispute kept Jayalalitha away from the
function, the foreign dignitaries must have had watched BJP's lone victor from
Tamil Nadu being sworn in as a Minister of State. Surely Bengal's 'mercurial
Mamata' kept away but the host of the celebrations, President Pranab Mukherjee,
was weighty enough to put Bengal's imprimatur on India's day of celebration of
democracy. It was Modi's day after all. At one stroke, he defined before India's
neighbors, if not the world at large, the country's true strength: democracy.
Every foreign guest present in the celebration must have gone back with the
same wonderment of de Tocqueville two hundred years ago.
However, the swearing-in celebration also bore the hallmark of Modi's out-of-the-box thinking. It is true that the inclusiveness of BJP in the Lok Sabha is stymied because it has no Muslim member. Non-acceptance of BJP by the largest minority is a historical fact. Modi surely wants to undo it. It is evident from his choice of 74-year-old Najma Heptulla as Minority Affairs Minister. Heptulla is a grand-niece of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India's first education minister. She is a valuable link to independent India's Nehruvian past and its syncretism culture. Earlier, BJP experimented with quite a few Muslim leaders. But none of them had the social and cultural status that Heptulla brings to the table. If a new deal with the largest minority community is necessary, none can initiate it better than Heptulla.
With
the swearing in of ministers, and portfolio allocation, have been marked by an
unexpected sobriety of manners, and a careful caution. The Modi government
would rather have a rule-book driven Arun Jaitley in the Finance Ministry than
Arun Shourie, a right-wing liberal—regardless of the fact that the stock market
got such a shock that it abruptly turned southward. Modi may respect Shourie’s
ideology but he is not to get typified so early in the day as a neo-liberal
Thatcherite. And, though he hardly measured his words against the Gandhi clan
during campaign, he understands their importance in Delhi’s political landscape. Though Modi may
not share Sonia Gandhi’s socialist belief system, he knows about her proximity
to Ram Vilas Paswan, her next door neighbor for decades, and a family friend of
sorts. The Prime Minister has given Paswan the charge of Food and Civil
Supplies, thinking, perhaps, that when Sonia’s favorite sops like NREGA and
Food Security do come up for some kind of a review, Paswan may be the best
person to make her realize that there’s nothing personal in it.
Between
May 16, the day elections results were out, and May 26, the Cabinet swearing-in
day, the temperature of politics has considerably dropped. A cool breeze has
begun to blow in. It is most welcome.
(The
author is
national editor of
Lokmat group)
