This comes with my hearty felicitations. I mean and say that in utter sincerity, which is not very easy for me to summon, because I am not one of those who wanted to see you reach the high office that you have reached. You know better than anyone else, that while many millions are ecstatic that you will become Prime Minister, many more millions may, in fact, be disturbed, greatly disturbed by it.
Until recently I did not believe those who said you were headed there. But, there you are, seated at the desk at which Jawaharlal Nehru sat, Lal Bahadur Shastri did, and, after a historic struggle against Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, another Gujarati, Morarji Desai did, as did later, your own political mentor, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Those who did not want you there have to accept the fact that you are there.
Despite all my huge misgivings about your deserving that rare privilege, I respect someone coming from so sharply disadvantaged a community and family as yours, becoming Prime Minister of India. That fulfils, very quintessentially, the vision of our egalitarian Constitution. Revisting the idea of desh
When some spoke rashly and derisively of your having been a “chaiwala,” I felt sick to my stomach. What a wonderful thing it is, I said to myself, that one who has made and served chai for a living should be able to head the government of India. Far better bearing a pyala to many than being a chamcha to one.
But, Mr. Modi, with that said, I must move to why your being at India’s helm disturbs millions of Indians. You know this more clearly than anyone else that in the 2014 election, voters voted, in the main, for Modi or against Modi. It was a case of “Is Narendra Modi the country’s best guardian — desh ka rakhvala — or is he not?” The BJP has won the seats it has because you captured the imagination of 31 per cent of our people (your vote share) as the nation’s best guardian, in fact, as its saviour. It has also to be noted that 69 per cent of the voters did not see you as their rakhvala. They also disagreed on what, actually, constitutes our desh. And this — the concept of desh — is where, Mr. Modi, the Constitution of India, upon the authority of which you are entering the office of Prime Minister, matters. I urge you to revisit the idea of desh. Reassuring the minorities
In invoking unity and stability, you have regularly turned to the name and stature of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. The Sardar, as you would know, chaired the Constituent Assembly’s Committee on Minorities. If the Constitution of India gives crucial guarantees — educational, cultural and religious — to India’s minorities, Sardar Patel has to be thanked, as do other members of that committee, in particular Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, the Christian daughter of Sikh Kapurthala. Adopt, in toto, Mr. Modi, not adapt or modify, dilute or tinker with, the vision of the Constitution on the minorities. You may like to read what the indomitable Sardar said in that committee.
Why is there, in so many, so much fear, that they dare not voice their fears?
It is because when you address rallies, they want to hear a democrat who carries the Peoplehood of India with him, not an Emperor who issues decrees. Reassure the minorities, Mr. Modi, do not patronise them. “Development” is no substitute to security. You spoke of “the Koran in one hand, a laptop in the other,” or words to that effect. That visual did not quite reassure them because of a counter visual that scares them — of a thug masquerading as a Hindu holding a Hindu epic’s DVD in one hand and a minatory trishul in the other.
In the olden days, headmasters used to keep a salted cane in one corner of the classroom, visible and scary, as a reminder of his ability to lash the chosen skin. Memories, no more than a few months old, of the riots in Muzaffarnagar which left at least 42 Muslims and 20 Hindus dead and displaced over 50,000 persons, are that salted cane. “Beware, this is what will be done to you!” is not a threat that anyone in a democracy should fear. But that is the message that has entered the day’s fears and night’s terrors of millions.
It is in your hands, Mr. Modi, to dispel that. You have the authority and the power to do that, the right and the obligation as well. I would like to believe that, overcoming small-minded advice to the contrary, you will dispel that fear.
All religious minorities in India, not just the Muslim, bear scars in their psyche even as Hindus and Sikhs displaced from West Punjab, and Kashmiri Pandits do. There is the fear of a sudden riot caused with real or staged provocation, and then returned with multiplied retribution, targeted very specially on women. Dalits and Adivasis, especially the women, live and relive humiliation and exploitation every minute of their lives. The constant tug of unease because of slights, discrimination, victimisation is de-citizenising, demoralising, dehumanising. Address that tug, Mr. Modi, vocally and visibly and win their trust. You can, by assuring them that you will be the first spokesman for their interests.
No one should have the impudence to speak the monarchist language of uniformism to a republic of pluralism, the vocabulary of “oneness” to an imagination of many-nesses, the grammar of consolidation to a sensibility that thrives in and on its variations. India is a diverse forest. It wants you to nurture the humus that sustains its great variety, not place before it the monochromatic monoculturalism of a political monotheism.
What has been taken as your stand on Article 370 of the Constitution, the old and hackneyed demand for a Uniform Civil Code, the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, and what the media have reported as your statements about “Hindu refugees” in our North and North-West and “Muslim refugees” in our East and North-East, strikes fear, not trust. Mass fear, Mr. Modi, cannot be an attribute of the Republic of India. And, as Prime Minister of India, you are the Republic’s alter ego.
India’s minorities are not a segment of India, they are an infusion in the main. Anyone can burn rope to cinder, no one can take the twist out of it. Bharat mata ki jai, sure, Mr. Modi, but not superseding the compelling urgency of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s clarion — Jai Hind!
A historic win it has been for you, Mr. Modi, for which, once again, congratulations. Let it be followed by a historic innings, which stuns the world by surprises your supporters may not want of you but many more would want to see you unfurl. You are hugely intelligent and will not mind unsolicited but disinterested advice of one from an earlier generation. Requite the applause of your support-base but, equally, redeem the trust of those who have not supported you. When you reconstitute the Minorities Commission, ask the Opposition to give you all the names and accept them without change. And do the same for the panels on Scheduled Castes and Tribes, and Linguistic Minorities. And when it comes to choosing the next Chief Information Commissioner, the next CAG, CVC, go sportingly by the recommendation of the non-government members on the selection committee, as long as it is not partisan. You are strong and can afford such risks.
Addressing the southern deficit
Mr. Modi, there is a southern deficit in your India calculus. The Hindi-belt image of your victory should not tighten itself into a North-South divide. Please appoint a deputy prime minister from the South, who is not a politician at all, but an expert social scientist, ecologist, economist or a demographer. Nehru had Shanmukham Chetty, John Mathai, C.D. Deshmukh and K.L. Rao in his cabinet. They were not Congressmen, not even politicians. Indira Gandhi had S. Chandrashekhar, V.K.R.V. Rao. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why the UPA did not make Professor M.S. Swaminathan and Shyam Benegal, both nominated members in the Rajya Sabha, ministers. There is a convention, one may even say, a healthy convention, that nominated members should not be made ministers. But exigencies are exigencies. Professor Nurul Hasan, a nominated member, was one of the best Ministers of Education we have had.
Imperial and ideological exemplars appeal to you. So, be Maharana Pratap in your struggle as you conceive it, but be an Akbar in your repose. Be a Savarkar in your heart, if you must, but be an Ambedkar in your mind. Be an RSS-trained believer in Hindutva in your DNA, if you need to be, but be the Wazir-e-Azam of Hindostan that the 69 per cent who did not vote for you, would want you to be.
With every good wish as you take your place at the helm of our desh,
I am, your fellow-citizen,
Gopalkrishna Gandhi
(The writer a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and Rajaji is a former administrator and diplomat. He was Governor of West Bengal, 2004-2009, and officiating Governor of Bihar, 2005-2006.)
To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realize ; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks .
Benjamin Graham.
Here is an open letter to all "left liuberals" who are writing open letters to Modi after the election results :
http://www.niticentral.com/2014/05/21/an-open-letter-to-everyone-writing-open-letters-to-modi-225617.html
Dear bleeding heart secularists,
I hope, despite having to nurse your recent wounds, you’re sitting somewhere safe in your psychological darkness that you have constructed around yourself.
Since lots of open letters are being written to Narendra Modi advising him how to respect the secular and pluralistic fabric of the country I thought well, why not I too participate in this stimulating epistolary exchange, and hence, this open letter.
I hope by now you have come to terms with the fact that there is going to be a “communal” government at the center despite your relentless pursuit to achieve the otherwise. If you haven’t, I hope you reconcile to the reality fast before emotional acidity leaves permanent scars on your personality.
Although you have given an interesting twist to the election results by talking in terms of the percentage of people who have voted for Narendra Modi and voted against him (31 per cent vs 69 per cent) by the end of the day what matters is what you intended to achieve and what has exactly happened. You say a mere 31 per cent votes means 69 per cent people have rejected him. Well, using the same logic, since the Congress got just 19.3 per cent of the total votes, doesn’t mean that almost 80 per cent of the country has rejected the so-called “grand old party”?
Modi Government must replicate Gujarat’s agrarian success across nation
It’s been a historic verdict and contrary to all your propaganda, misinformation campaigns, chest beating on national and international forums, twisting facts, fabrications and copious shedding of crocodile tears, for the first time almost after three decades, the country is going to have an absolute-majority Government with as clear a mandate as one can dream of. Hello stability. Bye bye anarchy. That’s settled.
For you it’s been a long battle, of course. The past 10-12 years were just a culmination and a crescendo but otherwise, you guys have been active for many decades in one form or another, pulling a string here, putting a piece there, ruining one career, promoting another. By colluding with the politicians, especially of the Congress variety, you have created an empire of mutual coexistence and devised a system to feed upon the masses of the country without killing them, for, if the masses die, whom do you feed on?
Divide the country at every pretext. Hammer into the minorities and the backwards why they need special treatment, how they are being suppressed, how they are being victimised and why they need protection from the majority. Blame the majority for being a majority. Denigrate its culture. Destroy its history. Throttle its sense of pride. Deride its festivals. Perpetrate intellectual confusion. Fill it with the plague of guilt. Do whatever it takes to crush its spirit completely. Isn’t it win-win situation? Keep the majority in doldrums and intellectual confusion and keep the minorities in a permanent state of insecurity. Nobody remains to put up a resistance.
Within this you-scratch-my-back-and-I-scratch-yours system, your political masters are happy, you are happy. More public insecurity means more consolidation for your political masters. More consolidation means greater political power. Greater political power means, well, power to do whatever you want to do. You get plum postings. You easily get grants. Massive funding is available for your NGOs without even one question asked. Your kids get admission in elite schools. You can get treatment in the best of hospitals. You enjoy foreign trips. You get to broker mega deals. You control the strings of millions of lives. Sometimes, even for writing a single Congress-friendly article you can get a bungalow in a posh locality. You can get published in “prestigious” magazines and newspapers even if you can’t write a single paragraph without mistakes. You can stop books from being published. You can easily get your own books published. You get to give talks at international conferences, mostly at exotic locations, all-expense paid. You get to hobnob with the Who’s Who of the society. You don’t have to worry about electricity. You don’t have to worry about water. Neither heat bothers you nor cold because you live and move in AC environment. Travel is automatically taken care of. Accommodation is something you never need to worry about. Your previous generation lived in the lap of luxury like this. Even the previous generation of the previous generation. And now you are reaping the fruits of all the trees your parents and grandparents planted. This is an ecosystem that has evolved over more than 60 years so naturally your multiple generations have contributed.
NDA gets pan-India visibility, influence
The problem is, your ecosystem hinges upon the survival of a particular class of political system. This political system sustains you to solve its own purpose. It needs you to keep the society divided and confused. It needs you to steer the public discourse in a desired direction. It needs journalists that never ask the right questions. It needs intellectuals like you who never hold them accountable. It needs scholars who can subvert the truth to weaken the cultural roots of the country. Basically, the survival of this particular class of political system depends on a highly polarised, a highly divided society, and you play a big part. You both support each other and without each other, life would be quite difficult.
Why Modi sarkar excites me
As a result, it robs you of your sleep when Mr Modi talks about unifying the country under the concept of nationhood rather than a hodgepodge of identities. The unity disturbs you. The fact that people should be Indians first and then different religions and castes leaves you uneasy. This makes you feel that people’s identities are going to be expunged. The fault lines will be blurred. People won’t be fighting each other. Many-ness, you pontificate, is better than oneness. It’s the current status of divisiveness and polarisation and fear and suspicion that sustains you, how can you possibly let it go?
Your very existence depends on being a champion of someone, of the downtrodden, of the endangered, of the marginalised and the victimised. Most of you run one or the other NGO. According to a CBI report – yes, a Government agency and not something related to the RSS – there are more than 20 lacs NGOs in India which means, there is one NGO for every 600 Indians. If you go by the conservative figures of the Home Ministry, these NGOs get roughly Rs 11,500 crore from various international agencies annually. With so much money involved, how can you even think of changing the status quo? I can understand your plight. Stronger India, a united India, a progressive India nullifies the existence of your NGO. Your favourite image of the country is someone like Mother Teresa putting a morsel into a half-skeleton-half-skin child whose big white eyes jut out of a withered, hairless skull.
Journey to regain India’s soul begins
So there is almost a 100 per cent chance you are not going to leave the Muslims alone. Under one pretext or another you’re going to rake up controversies and a few riots here and a few clashes there will be of course an icing on the cake. Many claim, rightly, that we haven’t had a Government, what we have had is a Ponzi scheme.
You and your political masters have had it good with this Ponzi scheme, with a few setbacks here and there. But overall it’s been a good run. The problem is, you grew lazy, as it normally happens with your kind of activities. You started using a template. Whether it was Gujarat riots or the RSS or the Togadias and the Singhals, or even the last-ditch effort, the snoop gate, most of your commentaries were merely a spinning of a selected few words. You used your template with such a phenomenal frequency that eventually it became a white noise. You know what’s white noise? It’s audio data your brain processes so frequently that after a while it stops interpreting it. No meaning is registered. Of course, the recent rout of your political masters had a lot to do with the political acumen and moral vehemence orchestrated by Modi, but your incessant messages turning into white noise also had a great role to play in your debacle.
12 Highlights of NaMo’s address in Central Hall
In your various open letters, you guys have been preaching Modi on the virtues of being a truly secular PM of such a diverse country as ours. You want to be proven wrong, you tell him. It’s high time he changed his image, you suggest. You want him not to rake up the issues of Article 370, the Ram temple in Ayodhya or even the Muslim refugees issue in the North-east. You urge him to banish the idea of creating a unified India and instead, let it remain the way it has been. You tell him that the idea of “Quran in one hand and laptop in another” is extremely repulsive to you. The minorities in India don’t need development, you advise him, they need reassurances.
I’m pretty sure Modi is not going to pay heed to whatever you have to say simply because he intends to run a Government, not a Ponzi scheme. You see, you are the part of the problem, not the solution, at least not with your current mental disposition. In order to become a part of the solution, you will need to discard your current notions which, I think, is not very easy for you to do because you have ingrained these notions into your existence. If you can have your way (sadly, you have had your way for way too long), you would rather have a Prime Minister who is hesitant about approaching even his own party president, as shown in this video:
Instead of dividing Indians, Narendra Modi intends to unite them. Instead of weakening them by dividing them into various segments, he wants to bring them together to turn them into a formidable force. Instead of the deen-heen mentality he boasts of a broad chest. Maybe when, highly unlikely, he decides to run a Ponzi scheme, he will refer to your council, but unless that happens, you stand no chance.
I am appalled at the odious open letter written by Gopalkrishna Gandhi in The Hindu today (19 May) to Narendra Modi, giving him not only unsolicited advice, but effectively telling him he does not have a mandate to govern. The best thing Modi can do is lie low and be a genial and over-compromising non-achiever who keeps detractors happy. After beginning his letter saying he did not want to see Modi as PM, Gopal Gandhi asserts startlingly that “while many millions are ecstatic that you will become prime minister, many more millions may, in fact, be disturbed, greatly disturbed by it.” Narendra Modi. AFP. Narendra Modi. AFP. Now, how did Gandhi come to this conclusion that “many more millions” may be disturbed by a Modi prime ministership? From the fact that the BJP’s vote share is 31 percent. So Gandhi glibly concludes that “69 per cent of the voters did not see you as their rakhvala. They also disagreed on what, actually, constitutes our desh.” Let’s be clear. In a first-past-the-post electoral system and in a fractured society like ours, mandates will be won on the basis of a minority of votes. This is the case not only with Modi’s mandate, but everybody’s in recent decades – and it is true in the states as well. But can a 31 percent vote be interpreted as a 69 percent rejection rate? This is bunkum. All it means is that for the balance 69 percent, Modi – for local and other reasons – may not have been a first choice. It does not imply any kind of rejection – unless we are talking only about the minorities, where, admittedly, Modi has some work to do. The only way to get a minimum 50 percent mandate is to have a French style system of having one or more eliminating rounds before the final vote. This would knock out the parties with the lowest shares in progressive stages – leaving only the two finalists seeking 50-percent plus and victory. The other way is to have a two-party system, or a German-style proportional representation system where parties getting less than 5 percent are knocked out. In this election, a German-style system of proportional representation would have left only the BJP and Congress as worthy of parliamentary representation. No other party touched 5 percent at the national level. But taking the Gopal Gandhi logic of 69 percent rejecting Modi to its logical conclusion, it would still mean that Modi was the politician India objected to the least. The Congress, with 19.3 percent of the vote, was rejected by over 80 percent of the electorate, the BSP by 96 percent of the electorate. If you consider the point that everyone, from Mulayam Singh to Nitish Kumar to Mamata Banerjee to J Jayalalithaa was also a contender for the PM’s job, one can well say over 95 percent of India rejected them. Only 69 percent “rejected” Modi. (Actually, the figure is 61.8 percent, since the NDA got 38.2 percent of the vote, and all NDA parties accepted Modi as their PM nominee). You may object that it is not fair to pit parties which are primarily present in some states against national parties in terms of vote share, but look at how they fared in their own states: Mamata Banerjee won 39.3 percent of the vote in West Bengal. Should we say 61 percent of West Bengal rejected her? In the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections of 2012, the Samajwadi Party got all of 29.13 percent of the vote. Should we now ask them to resign, since, by Gopal Gandhi’s logic, 71 percent of the state rejected Akhilesh Yadav? Clearly, Gopal Gandhi was wearing his prejudice on his sleeve rather than anything else when he told Modi that “69 per cent of the voters did not see you as their rakhvala.” There is no basis to assert this. Worse was his gratuitous advice to Modi on what he needed to do to redeem himself in the eyes of his detractors. The sum total of his advice is: let the opposition parties decide key posts that will come up for deliberation early in a Modi administration. To “redeem the trust of those who have not supported you”, Gopal Gandhi advises Modi to do the following: “When you reconstitute the Minorities Commission, ask the Opposition to give you all the names and accept them without change. And do the same for the panels on Scheduled Castes and Tribes, and Linguistic Minorities. And when it comes to choosing the next Chief Information Commissioner, the next CAG, CVC, go sportingly by the recommendation of the non-government members on the selection committee, as long as it is not partisan. You are strong and can afford such risks.” So if the opposition plants mischief in these posts, Modi is supposed to just take it lying down? Gopal Gandhi is essentially saying that till he voluntarily rejects the powers he has been conferred with, Modi will have no legitimacy. Gandhi did not give this advice to any previous government in Delhi – only to Modi. And why would Modi want to be such a doormat? Because, says Gandhi, many of the things he has stood for “strikes fear, not trust.” I don’t think anybody will disagree with Gandhi’s idea that the fears of minorities need to be addressed, and addressed fairly soon, but surely he is going overboard when he thinks that the idea of a uniform civil code is “old and hackneyed”. It is one thing to address this issue sensitively, quite another to think this essentially egalitarian idea is “hackneyed.” The only thing old and hackneyed is the idea that Modi is about to unleash a wave of Hindutva where Trishul-wielding militants will be Talibanising and terrorising India. Unfortunately, this is an idea that can be dispelled only over the tenure of Modi’s prime ministership. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating. Meanwhile, anyone, including Gopal Gandhi, is free to continue with his scare-mongering tactics.
To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realize ; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks .
Benjamin Graham.
Joined: 29/May/2007
Location: India
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 1134
Posted: 22/May/2014 at 9:12pm
[PRESS STATEMENT OF DR SUBRAMANIAN SWAMY | 22 May, 2014] with regard to the Invitation extended by Narender Modi to SL President Rajapaksa along with other SAARC leaders and the protest to the same in TN over the invitation to the SL President .
"This
invitation to Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa is an invitation
from one sovereign country to another sovereign neighbouring country.
Constitutional principle under the 7th schedule of the Constitution
makes it clear that international relation is the exclusive right of the
Central government. State governments have no say when it comes to
foreign relations. We follow democratic principles of consultation and
seek the views and opinions of the state governments. But, it is not a
Constitutional right. The Centre can try to build a consensus. That's
it.
There is a series of
allegations of human rights violations against the Sri Lankan
government. It happened even during the second World War in which
millions of civilians died. When America dropped nuclear bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only the civilians died, no military personnel
died. Human rights are a collateral damage in a war. Even the LTTE is
also equally responsible for the death of thousands of civilians. Of
course it was a war. Even the LTTE has been indicted by many for the
loss of lives and human rights violations.
What way the Tamils in
Tamil Nadu or their government in Tamil Nadu are responsible for the
welfare of Sri Lankan Tamils in Jaffna? Jaffna has its own elected
government. The Chief Minister of Jaffna has repeatedly requested the
Indian Tamils and politicians not to interfere in the internal affairs
of Sri Lanka. He feels that the Indian Tamil politicians are creating
more trouble and enmity between Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka.
If India wants to do something for the Tamils in Sri Lanka, it has to
deal with the elected President of Sri Lanka. We can't force the Sri
Lankan government to do something, which they don't want to do. We can
persuade them. They can concur with us. We can't by-pass the
Constitutional provisions and established norms.
We are also
facing the allegations of human rights violations in Kashmir, Nagaland
and Manipur etc. How can we single out Sri Lanka? We must remember all
these things.
We are allowing Pakistan and China to strengthen
their ties and base in Sri Lanka. It is not good for India. Vacuum
allows our enemies to take an upper hand in Sri Lanka.
Finally,
the Lok Sabha election is an example. The MDMK chief Vaiko, who is
considered very close to the LTTE, has been defeated by Indian Tamil
voters. It was a humiliating defeat. Vaiko was our alliance partner. He
brought us down.
I say that foreign policy is the domain of the Centre. It is not a state subject".
Party sources said Ilmi was unhappy with the party leadership on certain issues, including the choice of her Lok Sabha constituency Ghaziabad from where she had unsuccessfully contested.
Ilmi, a journalist who has been with the AAP since its inception, had conveyed the party leadership her desire to contest from one of the seven seats in Delhi in the Lok Sabha elections.
The AAP leader is expected to address media on Saturday.
Ilmi, a popular minority face of the party, had also lost Delhi assembly elections from the R K Puram constituency.
To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realize ; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks .
Benjamin Graham.
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